Musical simples: Come Together

Presumably you’re familiar with this song? If not, run out and get Abbey Road and don’t deprive yourself for another minute. As far as I’m concerned, you can have Revolver and Sergeant Pepper and whatever else; Abbey Road is the best Beatles album. It opens with the funkiest, baddest bass and drum riff in their entire recorded output.
come-together-midi

This classic Paul McCartney bass riff uses almost the entire D blues scale: D, F, G, G-sharp, A, C. The left diagram below shows the scale on the chromatic circle, and the right one below shows the scale on the circle of fifths.

Come Together - D blues scale

But the bassline doesn’t use the notes in order. First, it hits the root twice. Then it walks up from four to sharp four to five, followed by a dramatic jump up to three in the next octave. Finally, it lands on the root in the higher octave.

The rhythm is a bit more complicated than the harmony, as is usual for rock. Let’s divide the simple up into four beats.

  • Beat one: bum bum, eighth notes on the root.
  • Beat two: budada DAHHHH, sixteenth note triplets and then a much higher eighth note that hangs over into…
  • Beat three: just the tail of that high note from beat two.
  • Beat four: a quarter note on the higher root note.

When you improvise over “Come Together” using D blues, every note will sound good, but you won’t be able to play the entire vocal melody, or Billy Preston’s electric piano part. To learn those, play D Dorian instead.

The appeal and power of this song is as much about sound as it is the pitches and rhythms. The drums are incredibly compressed by 1960s standards–the cymbal crashes are transformed from a crisp “ksh” sound into more of a sludgy “gzzzsssshhhhhh.” The first kick drum in each beat is doubled with someone saying “shhhhoom” through heavy tape delay. Aside from John Lennon’s nasal vocal and the cymbals, all of the sounds sit in the bottom half of the frequency spectrum. It’s all murky bass and low mids until the electric piano and guitar burst out in the instrumental break halfway through the song. Even though Billy Preston is just playing a simple blues riff, his solo explodes out of the speakers from the sonic contrast, and George Harrison’s doubletracked lead guitar floats on top like a choir of angels. “Come Together” is a well-written and well-performed song all the way around, but it’s the swampy production that makes it a masterpiece.

2 thoughts on “Musical simples: Come Together

  1. Do you believe McCartney’s claim that he knows nothing about music theory? Some of the chord progressions he used seemed to indicate otherwise.

    • I believe McCartney’s claim that he is totally untrained. He knows a lot about music theory implicitly, and has probably picked up some terminology over the years, but he worked everything out by ear, trial and error, and so on. This is true of nearly all rock musicians of his generation and most rock musicians now.

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