Still on a series of catchup posts here.

A throwback to March, that seemed to be the popular month to get married for some of my friends. I had the privilege of being the wedding pianist for one of them! This friend made a request for me to perform “Shout to the Lord”, specifically taking after a cover by the band, Local Sound. I actually happen to really like this song because of its chill, jazzy vibes.

But it turns out if you listen to a song countless times and try to dissect it, you realize that there are some patterns that it follows that makes sense and others that leave you more, “???”.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any video recordings taken of this song but I do have this rough audio recording I took as a reference with the help of a housemate lending her voice to cover the vocals (which she did an impressive job on without actually knowing this cover at all)

Trying to recall the details of what is now a two-month old memory, I’m really glad that I wrote down my notes, which honestly looks like gibberish. However, it tells quite a story.

This song was a fun challenge to work out. Unlike other praise or worship songs, there is more of a jazzy/dissonant feel to this cover. It wasn’t as melodic or used as many predictable musical resolutions as the typical praise songs. The use of modern synthetic sounds, bass, drums, and the use of remixing a soundbite from the original song (“Shout to the Lord”), immediately prompted me with the question, “Oh…how do I translate something with these many modern aspects to something that a piano can handle?”

a.k.a. “Classically trained musician is asked to play jazz without knowing how to play jazz.”

Focusing on what the keyboard part of this song could handle, I eventually settled on scaling the song back to be a sort of “R&Bish but classy/elegant-ish enough for a wedding” feel of a song while trying to retain a good number of the elements from the cover. I wasn’t sure what that vibe would end up looking like but I just knew that the end product would probably turn out less experimental and more classic, compared to the cover.

My first step was taking over the rhythm set by the drums with my left hand, which ended up being an anchor for me for keeping track of when the rhythm would switch between syncopated and playing on beat.

For the first twenty seconds of this song, it first starts off with a nice piano before some weird sounds that I don’t know what to call kick in at the 00:10 mark. I compensated for my piano’s lack of ability to make such sounds by starting high range and soft and transitioning to low range and loud to mimic the effect of the weird sounds kicking off the song.

Another tweak I made was to change up the keyboard part of the first verse. The cover actually just repeats the same part that plays in the intro. Without the backing of modern technology band, I anticipated that mimicking this on the piano would probably not work as well. For stylistic reasons, I opted to go for a classic, harmonic approach that followed the melody.

It sounded prettier on a piano and it was easier to figure out lol.

For every time the “Shout to the Lord” tag popped up, I took over as a little motif.

The chorus came together fairly quickly, mostly following the melody line.

There were two noteworthy challenges that came up in this song.

One came up during second round of verse 2 at around the 2:21 mark with the instrumental transitioning into the next part of the verse of “Oh, you’re my comfort”. The many times I had to repeat that part to figure out the timing, because it definitely came on an off beat. Eventually I had to write it out because I could not figure out at what point that would come in.

Maybe if I had more prowess for jazz rhythms, I could mimic exactly whatever the bass line was doing with this point but I ended up coming up with a compromise of doing a syncopated arpeggio instead, which did the trick.

The second challenge appeared at around 3:10 during the second chorus with the line, “I sing for joy at the work of your hands”, where it’s another instance of surprise syncopation (sounds like an eighth note-dotted note sort of business) and some vocals following the beat of the drum line. I didn’t quite understand it. After trying a few times to mimic it on the piano, I couldn’t get it to work. That pattern, without the depth of vocals, just sounded super choppy and off-putting. I ended up tweaking it so that it would be a descending triplet pattern timed right after the beat on “hands” instead to make it sound more smooth while still retaining it sort of off-beat nature.

The actual performance on the wedding day, I had to make some last minute tweaks to shortening the length of the song, most notably nixing the “Shout to the Lord” motif repeating and fading at the end. It was a little chaotic and a little rough but in the end, the singers pulled through and we all rolled with the punches. I think the performance I gave was half-decent and something that I felt pretty satisfied with. It definitely was a fresh take for a congratulatory song.

Overall, this was a fun project to work on and I’m really glad I got the opportunity to do this!