Button Pushers » Album

You’re Welcome Face

Johnny — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:01:15 +0000

Yes, you can thank me later. Don’t make me blush, I know I’ve enriched your lives greatly because of this. We can all grow up now learning to master the guitar by playing Button Pushers tunes right off their website. Indoctrination! at least, that’s the idea. Well, maybe just added appreciation for what the music looks like on paper. (Look under Music>Tab at the top of the BP homepage.)

Ok, we’re all grown up now but I remember fondly learning guitar out of Metallica songbooks. I supplemented heavy metal riffs with 70’s and 80’s pop song collections that we also had lying around. There’s nothing like trying to reconcile Metallica’s “Harvester of Sorrow” with that of the Bee Gee’s “Islands in the Stream”–you get conflicted. But that’s temporary, and in the end, the more music someone has to study or just to play around with, the broader their horizons and the more apt they are to enjoy music in all its forms.

The first entry is “Your Lucky Face.” I wrote it using TablEdit Carbon.

Button Pushers’ Sheet Music

Johnny — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:00:41 +0000

If you wanna READ some of our music note for note, I’m in the process of writing out the guitar tab for the album. Right now, “Your Lucky Face” and “Green Bug” are finished. It’ll be another month or so before I get a half of these songs posted. If anyone has a particular song they’d like to see posted in our sheet music/guitar tab section sooner than later, I’ll write that song up and publish it first. Otherwise, I’ll just crank ‘em out as I feel.

I realize that I’m posting this message with the likelihood that either no one responds, or someone in the band responds, probably Rob, who isn’t sure what the actual chord is in a certain part of a song and needs it written out for him. –Rob, all I ask is that you use a clever alias. None of this John Smith bullshit.

Healing Hands Hold Up

Johnny — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:00:50 +0000

Looking forward to finally mastering this album. There’ll be unforeseen tweaks to be made, of course, but I’ve narrowed much of the to-do list for this thing down to finishing the song “Healing Hands.” I think I’ve agonized over this tune more than any other. I wrote parts of it over the course of about four years, until I finally settled on a version with the help of my friend, Mark Spiro, who added some lyrics and all of the music for the verses. Brilliant decisions on those chord changes, Mark! If you dig some music theory, those changes in the verse are sure to impress. At least, I think they’re really clever. I wanted to include Spiro in this song’s creation because he had recently recovered Hodgkin’s Disease (sp?), (and aside form being a prolific and spectacular songwriter himself), therefore, getting his perspective on my half-finished song was a great opportunity and a no-brainer.

I got the idea from a furniture commercial in Eugene, OR, which had this nice build up (similar chords to the pre-chorus of Healing Hands) but didn’t deliver the next chord and subsequent melody I was hearing in my head. I think I was studying Tchaikowsky’s Romeo and Juliet at the time. Not kidding. So, instead of the chords G – A – G – A into D Major (like the furniture commercial), I wrote Healing Hands G – A – G – A into B Major Suspended 4th. It was a less-obvious choice and it sounds bigger. I thought the listener would be pleasantly surprised.

We recorded it a few years ago at Spiro’s studio in Carlsbad, CA, but I never felt like the music was filled out properly. We probably could’ve used some live drums back then. This newer version, for the album Automaticity, utilizes more modern sounds and I’m pretty happy with the instrumentation, but I’m totally hung up on the vocal takes. It’s the only tune that really comes off as a ballad, but the sound profile we used for it was meant to match that of the other songs.

As soon as “Healing Hands” is sorted out, we’ll get this thing mastered, printed and available on our website.