Day 22 | Minute papillon!

I have this memory of a Sunday evening in the winter when I was 5 or 6. It is between dusk and dinner, it’s bath time and I’m at the top of stairs, naked as a worm, yelling for my mum to come and help me draw the bath. She’s downstairs in the kitchen making soup and she yells back at me, not very kindly, “Minute papillon!” (~ “hang on a minute” in French, literally “Minute butterfly”)

Why is this relevant?

1. Winter is (almost) here,
2. I had my first soup of the season this week,
3. If you had watched me practice the Cliffs this week you would have spent your time yelling “Minute papillon” at me. I had trouble keeping it slow.

More on this below, but first…

Progress update!

Here’s where I am at the moment:

I can now play:

• the whole intro at 55 bpm
• the first verse at 90 bpm
• the chorus, leisurely, with a lot of imperfections

Change of plan

My initial plan was to learn the whole song at 30% of the original tempo. But when I started playing the pre-verse and first verse, I realised that that speed was excruciatingly slow. So I moved my target for that part to 50% or 90 bpm. A little more satisfying. And I think I’ll aim for the same for the chorus.

Which means that I might go back to the intro to speed it up earlier than I anticipated. Or maybe do that progressively while I keep practicing it on the side? 🧐 (and it needs a lot of practice…)

Intro, bars 8 to 15, around 55bpm

Finding the beat

I still had to start learning the first verse at a slow tempo. And it made it hard for me to get the rhythm down. I understood it at the original speed, I knew where the notes fell on and between the beats. But as soon as I took the tempo down, I lost track and I caught myself rushing some notes to half their value.

What helped me get over that was to write down the tab with clear markers for where the beats were (or at least clearer than the tabs I was following that used a lot of dots and ties in sequence):

Verse 1 tabs

In the end I think I managed to get it right (not in the recording below, though — sorry, I didn’t manage to record anything better). But maybe I’ll find out that’s not the case when I increase the speed.

Very bad recording of the first verse at 90pbm

Then I got excited

After the verse, comes the chorus. Which is amazing and iconic (to me, at least). I couldn’t resist venturing into it! And I didn’t do it with a lot of discipline…

I kind of tried playing by ear at first, just dragged into the recognisable phrase of the chorus every time I finished playing the verse.

Then I figured I should have a look at the tabs at least, and I discovered that, although I wasn’t too far, I had missed a few things in my rendition.

Still, I didn’t stop to memorise the variations in the phrases. Instead I cheekily played the first 4 bars on repeat, way too fast and dirty, but enjoying myself.

This evening, I finally looked into the details of the whole chorus more closely and tried to commit them to memory. Now I have to practice it a bit more seriously with a metronome.

The chorus: 1 phrase, 4 variations

I also need to do some pinky workout! There are a lot of slides in the chorus, and they’re almost all performed by the pinky finger. And mine is too weak to produce consistently clean slides.

This week I’m focusing on building up the chorus and strengthening the intro and verse.

See you soon! Leave your comments below :)