several months ago my teacher had me starting to work on beautiful love and, as i do, i dove right in. i got it programmed into reaper, grabbed the midi melody from a transcription on musescore, and printed out the chart. i was ready. i spent the month working on it every day hoping to have it all buttoned up for my next lesson. each day i would pick apart each section, loop it, work with it. when my next lesson came along my teacher asked "how's the tune?" and i said "i hate it."
oh man did i hate this song. now, granted you don't have to like every song but there was something about this one that i hated. i worked with it objectively, it was an exercise i was using to learn something so i didn't really have to like it. but, ick... started to not only avoid it but actively hate it. after that month i never looked back. well, until a few days ago.
okay, maybe i had a bit hasty in my panning, but at the time that tune could go kick rocks. since then i've worked on plenty of other stuff and the other day i was feeling a bit bored with the songs i've been working decided to take another look at it. immediately i had a completely different view of the tune. the work i had been doing had given me a different insight that i didn't have when i first worked on it. in particular, ii-V-1's. i'm not saying i didn't know what they were or how to manage them, but i did not have the volume of them under my fingers as i do now. for the past several months ii-V-I's have been the focus of my work approaching them from all the chord tones and playing them in all the keys. visually, mechanically, and sonically they're much more internalized.
when i first approached beautiful love i did not have ii-V-I's internalized, though conceptually i understood them. academically, i suppose. i could describe and explain them, even play them, so i knew them more or less. well, more less. once again the chasm between intellectually understanding a thing and having it be internalized is underscored and widened. when i approached the song this time all the ii-V-I's popped into place. i saw them for what they were and was able to move between them because i've been working on running them through all the keys daily. it was just a "oh yeah, this thing again".
though the song is not difficult to begin with, and although i was certainly able to play it then, there is an understanding about it that simply was not possible at the time, no matter how much i analyzed the chords or whatever. only though daily work and internalization of the language can it begin to be understood. that's a neat thing to see.
