Gruber

My Fickle Friend - Sheet Music

Added 2022-10-03 14:00:08 +0000 UTC

Sheet music attached for My Fickle Friend! Out of all the songs from Songs of Past, it’s the one with the most influence from contemporary jazz piano.

This song took a long time to write. It started with my “chord factory” in Ableton – a collection of interesting, unconventional voicings.

With this factory, I can spurt out random sequences of chords, isolate the ones that are most interesting, and re-sequence them in an interesting way.

After learning how to play these new chord progressions at the piano, I realized that it sounded too “hymn like,” and needed more motion. So I improvised a lot with the voicings, arpeggiating them up and down, juggling them rhythmically between the hands, keeping the top note (melody) in the foreground….

What you’re hearing is the result of about a year of writing, editing, experimenting, and improvising. Because of this, the sheet music is a kind of hybrid between a score and a lead sheet.

I couldn’t remember how all the notes were distributed between by hands, and even if I did, I didn’t like how it looked in notation form. If anybody wants to learn how to play this, they’ll have to learn it as I did, by learning the shell voicings, and playing around with them rhythmically. This is one way jazz pianists learn how to improvise anyways – creating variation from higher, abstracted structures with physical play!

Hope you enjoy!