Harmer came up with an unrelenting fourbar line that stays steady even as the guitar and piano imply a cycling shift from hopeful major to mournful minor halfway through the phrase. The bulk of the tune contains the downpicked line in Ex. 1, with Nick staying on the 3rd and 4th frets on his Epiphone Jack Casady bass until bar 4’s climactic climb to A. A short slide back down and the line starts again, continuing its persistent mission.
TRANSCRIPTION TREASURE
In honor of our 20th Anniversary, we’re highlighting some favorite passages from our trove of transcriptions.
FROM June ’05
THE SONG Crosby Stills & Nash’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” from 1969’s Crosby Stills & Nash [Atlantic]
THE BASSIST Stephen Stills
THE SESSION The session took place in February 1969. Stills recalls cutting the track in one take in the control room alongside engineer Bill Halverson. “We had recorded the scratch vocal tracks, but I had to get the bass line down before we could really sing to it, because the vocal phrasing wouldn’t work until I had the bass line together.”
THE GEAR Stephen recorded the part using his 1960 Fender Precision Bass. “I’ve used that same bass on virtually everything I’ve done,” he reveals. “I had the same set of flatwound strings on it for almost ten years. I wanted the bass to sound like an upright— without much sustain. So I’d cover the strings in cheeseburger grease, barbecue sauce— even blood—so they’d get nice and dead. I don’t want it to sound like a friggin’ guitar! For an amp, I think I used my old brownfaced Fender Bassman, or maybe an Ampeg B-15. At that time, recording technology was such that lower frequencies wouldn’t transfer that well. They’d bounce the needle right out of the groove. So we used a Urei compressor for the bass—it had a nice midrange, and it evened out the sound.
THE PASSAGE Stephen’s bass lines in the various parts of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” read like a tribute to his bass heroes. For the bridge, he cues a shift to half-time with a McCartneylike slide. “I was trying to sound like Macca, especially in the middle,” he says.
READER’S TIP
FROM CARV INFAN
When I was in college, my best friend was Dave Hagleganz, an incredible 17-year-old tenor player. He and I would practice all hours of the night (I was on upright) using a wicked method we came up with on the spot. We would write down every chord, including tensions, on little pieces of paper. We’d throw them into a paper bag, shake it up, and then draw out 12 slips and lay them on a table in the order we took them out. Dave and I would play straight 4 against the chords as they were laid out. Some of the changes were the most awful you’d ever hear, but it improved our sight-reading a lot. After three months of summer practice like that, we came back to class and could sight-read any song placed in front of us. We were so used to playing awkward and difficult sounding changes, everything after that was a piece of cake.