I might allow that the A note in this sequence is sustained slightly longer than the G notes surrounding it. But three times as long? No.
The renditions of this theme I’m familiar with have G-A-G sequences of nearly equal length. Whoever is singing Van Halen’s rendition (I’m honestly supremely indifferent as to whether it’s David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar…I imagine it’s the former) seems to be exaggerating the “dee” part for effect.
No, I’ve seen the bass line in printed music many times. If the g-a-g were all the same length you’d end up with a 7/8 time signature, which might work for jazz, but not for western.
Here’s a link to a sample page from downloadable sheet music for Happy Trails.
ETA: I forgot to add that the bass line is typically “swung”–that is played with more of a triplet feel.
I concur. I don’t see anything wrong with K364’s notation; it depends on how hard you’re swinging it, if it’s 3:1 (a hard swing/shuffle) or 2:1 (more usual triplet feel swing). It’s probably closer to 2:1. I would probably just write it in straight eights and then notate the swing up top. At any rate, I can’t think of any version where the last three notes of the sequence are equal in time. The Van Halen version is just a normal swing.
OK, so it’s a common bass line. When I think of the music, I hear the guitar playing the line, and then there’s a harmonica with the melody. It sounds like Happy Trails is it, though the first link didn’t sound quite right to me. (Of course, I still had the harmonica in my head.)
FWIW, I get frustrated by the PC at my office when it’s running slowly. I have a .wav of Beaky Buzzard singing Arkansas Traveller that I play when it’s especially slow, which amuses me and my coworker. I thought I might find the guitar-and-harmonica music to play for a change. 
I tend to think of the soundtrack theme to The Magnificent Seven when I think of quintessential western music.
Doesn’t really go with frustration over a slow computer, though. 
Cowboys were frustrated by slow computers?
I would recommend playing back the MIDI from the sheet music on the page that’s linked. To me it sounds horribly stilted. Roy and Dale would have fallen off of their horses trying to sing to this!
I’ll concede that the A note does have to be longer than the Gs that surround it to give it some swing. But I continue to believe that three times as long is excessive.
With the caveat that my days of working with notes on a staff are quite a long ways behind me (10th grade would have been the last time — I play guitar but don’t use musical notation to do so), I’ve been messing around with this in Garage Band.
If I make all the C’s and A’s eighth notes, and make the G’s sixteenth notes (two iterations of the riff per measure), it plays back exactly the way I expect this theme to sound.
If this is breaking the rules in some way, my apologies. But this result gets me much closer to the sound of this motif than starting with a dotted eighth note does.
So FWIW, here is my version (bass line only). If you think the sheet music sounds closer to the mark, there’s nothing more I can say.
It doesn’t work because the song is in 4/4 time, each iteration of the bass figure (not riff) has to take 2 beats. The Cs and As fall on each beat, with the Gs in between, Like this:
1 2 3 4
C G A G C G A G
With what you describe you’d have
1 2 3
C G A G C G A G
And then you’re missing a whole beat. So now Roy and Dale have to try to sing it as a waltz with a weirdly syncopated bass line.
What you’re missing is that when the rhythm is swung, you shorten one note a tad but lengthen the next one a tad. It’s not meant to be played exactly as written, but more like 16th note triplets with the first two 16ths tied, and even that would sound stilted played precicely by a sequencer. By writing each beat as dotted eighth sixteenth it takes less space on the paper and is easier to read.
You see a similar thing in jazz where a line might be written on the page as straight eighth notes but played with closer to a triplet feel. It’s common enough that if a line is intended to be played straight there’ll be a notation, like (don’t swing) or (straight eights).
I did my Garage Band thing in 6/8 time, which is probably cheating, I know. But what I wrote fit with two iterations of the riff per measure.
But sheet music aside (which I’m betting they never got near to) I don’t see that Roy and Dale would have any problem singing their song over the bass line that I created, which comes very close to the song as I remember it. Whereas I continue to maintain they would have a lot of trouble singing it with any kind of smoothness over the sheet music as written — even if it’s fudged a bit. (Did you listen to the MIDI on that page?)
I will grant you that my notation skills are wanting…but I don’t believe my ears are.
It’s not that it’s cheating, it’s not the right time signature. The melody is written in 4/4 like this:
4 | 1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4
Happy | Trails To | You un | till we meet a | gain Happy
Anyway, listen to your recording again and count along in 4/4. You’ll find that the Cs and As hit on the beats and the Gs fall somewhere in between, which is how the sheet music is intended to be played. The MIDI on the page doesn’t sound right because it’s not played by a human and does not match the way it’s intended to be played. And that’s going to be true of almost any MIDI generated from sheet music. The sequencer will play it with mathematical precision, and most of the time it’s not supposed to be played that way.
Go back and listen to the MIDI on some of the other songs the site has, like Crazy. They’re all going to sound odd in one way or another, because it’s just not possible to notate it exactly the way a human would play it.
“Take me back to my boots and saddle”
I’m agree with you there. If you look back at my post, I do say it sounds more like a 2:1 swing than a 3:1 swing. And I said that I personally would write it out in straight eighth notes and then make a notation at the top of the sheet music to swing it.
My objection was with you saying that the G-A-G sequence has notes of nearly equal length. It doesn’t. K364’s representation is more accurate conceptually and one of the ways that swing is sometimes notated, with a dotted eight note followed by a sixteenth note for every pair. Even more accurate would be writing it out as eighth note triplets with a quarter note followed by an eighth note. Like this.
Swing is not something that is notated precisely, and generally see it notated in three ways: One is with the above note, showing that a pair of eighth notes is a quarter-eighth triplet sequence. Another is just to write it out as dotted eighths followed by a sixteenth. That does, yes, usually overstate the value of the swing, but you will sometimes find it notated thusly in sheet music. And the third is like the first, to simply notate it all in straight eighth notes and expect the performer to swing it, usually with an instruction like “Hard swing” or simply “Swing.” Oh, and there is a fourth: writing it out in 12/8 time. All are approximations, and how much you swing each eighth note pair also varies by tempo. Very fast songs get swung closer to 1:1 (straight time), while at slow tempos the duration between notes is exaggerated closer to 3:1. And, of course, all this varies from performer to performer.
OK, so I looked at the waveform from this version of “Happy Trails” in Audacity, and it is pretty much a 2:1 swing on the woodblocks in the back. I’m getting values of about .45 seconds for the first half and around .25 seconds for the second half over the first couple of measures, so we’re looking at a pretty standard swing. At any rate, the G-A-G part is not uniform or even close to uniform. It follows the swing pattern you would expect (short-long-short, in this case, since the C that begins the phrase started the pattern with a long.)
ETA:
Yes, that would be correct. So we’re not in disagreement in the end. And you can write it in 6/8 or (I’d prefer) 12/8 if you’d like.
Yes, I’ve since abandoned that position, as I said in my last post. I think I took it initially because it the dotted eighth/sixteenth bit was further off the mark.
I’m glad we ended up in basic agreement. Despite it being “wrong” from some sort of technical standpoint, I ended up with a notation that, when played by a machine, still sounds a hell of a lot closer to the actual song than the sheet music referenced.
But would you not concede that, “wrong” though my way might be, it still got closer to the mark?
Forgive me for going off on a bit of tangent here, but there’s a story I’ve been telling for a long time that I find illustrative…and that relates somewhat to what we’ve been discussing here.
I’ve always been fascinated by the dichotomy between “trained” and “feel” musicians. As is probably obvious, I’m the latter…although I did play in school band through 10th grade (sax and oboe) and learned to read music. But once I got a guitar, I left all of that behind, and, as I’ve said, have never really applied much of that kind of learning to guitar playing.
The story that sums up the difference is this: a close friend of mine in high school had an older brother who had a fair amount of formal musical training, as he was the guy who always played the organ during the school orchestra’s classical concerts. (As I recall, he otherwise played trombone.) I suspect he did Bach or whoever else was on the program on a given day.
At some point, this older brother took up guitar. It was apparent that he had learned his basic chords well enough. But one night, at a party, both my friend and his brother were in attendance. I had a guitar, and he had a guitar (both acoustic). Some jamming ensued, and I started playing Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand.”
If you know the song, you know that there’s a long instrumental section in which Neil stretches out on guitar, while Crazy Horse plays repeated iterations of Am and F behind him. Those two chords alternate like clockwork throughout this jam, one measure of each ad infinitum.
So I’ve finished the second chorus, and I’m going into this jam section. As long as my friend’s brother was playing along with my chord changes, he was fine. The very moment I abandoned playing the chords and took off on lead, he became hopelessly lost. This guy, for all the musical training that had gone into him becoming a fine organ player, capable of playing Bach, could absolutely NOT play one measure of Am, one measure of F, another measure of Am, etc.
He couldn’t “feel” these simplest of changes, and had no concept of when to change from one chord to another, even though I had established the pattern before starting to play lead. He wasn’t just a little off…he was off very badly…even after I came back and played a few more rounds of the chords. When I stopped, he was lost.
Lest you think I’m singling him out as particularly incompetent, I’ve talked to many others over the years who’ve made the point that some musicians, for all their skill, just can’t improvise, and are totally at sea if they don’t have sheet music in front of them that charts every single note that emanates from their instrument.
While I could greatly benefit, I’m sure, from more formal musical training, I’ve always been leery of it at the same time. If I have to make a choice, I’ll take being a “feel” musician any day of the week. It has worked for me (for playing admittedly mostly simple music: rock ‘n’ roll and country) for nearly 50 years now.
I have another less dramatic but still illustrative story, but I’ll save it just in case others would like to chime in on this subject. Does anyone else have experiences along these lines?
No, because your way doesn’t fit with the melody. Interpreting it as 6/8 may sound the same in isolation, but it’s quite different when you try to add the melody. The first full measure ends up like this, where the periods represent the sixteenths:
1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 .
C G A G C G A G
But the melody notes, a dotted quarter followed by a quarter in 4/4, would have to be written as a half note tied to a sixteenth note followed by a dotted eighth note to come out sounding right. Yes, it would sound the same, but it would be messy and hard to read on the page.
If you’re reading off your sheet music, it actually wouldn’t be that difficult to move into 12/8 and avoid all the problems. The “Happy Trails to you” part could be notated as a quarter followed by an eighth (it sounds swung to me, but a little against the rhythm, so not swung quite as hard–or you can notate it as a duplet if you want to keep the time even), then a dotted half tied to a dotted quarter, followed by a dotted quarter, etc. Nothing that looks weird or out-of-place for 12/8 music. I don’t see any part with a dotted quarter followed by a quarter.
When you get farther into your sheet music, you’ll find that the “who cares about the clouds when we’re together, etc” is written as straight eighths, when it’s clearly swung with what feels to me more like a triplet feel than an eighth note pulse.
In any case, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to notate completely accurately.
Like I said above, it’s not my preferred notation. I’d write it in straight time and just tell the performer to swing it as much as they think is appropriate, and not every part is a swing song is swung to the same level. The vocal lines might swing a little harder or a little more than the rhythm track, and it may vary in phrases.
I mean, I think of it as swung 4/4, but I’ve seen a number of old blues and jazz numbers that were written in 12/8 that would now probably be written simply as 4/4, so I can’t come out and say 12/8 is outright “wrong” for this.
How does it “not fit with the melody”? Are you saying that it would be impossible for Roy and Dale to sing over the MIDI sample I produced with my notes? (Leaving aside the small matter of them being dead now!)
I have stipulated that what I did was not rendered correctly using standard musical notation. But that is a matter of time signature, not note values. The notes I put on the staff (and their time values), irrespective of time signature, produce sounds that ARE the bass line of “Happy Trails” — certainly to a far more accurate degree than the notes that are on the sheet music that was linked to.
My eyes start to glaze over when 12/8 is being discussed, but Pulykamell seems to indicate that something along the lines of what I wrote could be fit into a 12/8 time signature.
I just find it hard to believe that a bass line that seems so simple and intuitive to play would present such a daunting challenge to transcribe.
Maybe it’s at this point we should give thanks to jazz, R&B, rock and country music, which it seems to me freed a lot of people from the strict rhythm constraints of formal classical music. And maybe this is why classic musicians seem to sound so stiff and awkward when they try to perform music like this.