Notes to Transcription of Marc Ribot's Cover
of La Vida es un Sueño.

Version 0.01 by John Lapeyre

Introduction:

This is a transcription from the studio recording of the
guitar part (and bass) of Marc Ribot's cover of La Vida Es
un Sueño. I did this transcription as a pedagogical
exercise, to study Ribot's playing and to learn about music
and arrangements in general. It's probably not useful as
sheet music for a band wanting to learn the piece. It
contains errors and is incomplete and inconsistent in some
respects.  It also contains far more details and exact
solos, for instance, than would be useful for a band.
Furthermore, this is not at all an 'authentic' arrangement
of this piece. A band wanting to play Cuban dance music
would find this transcription useless. However, some people
argue, and now I agree, that transcribing music and
including dynamics and articulations can help tremendously
in listening closely and understanding the rhythm and
nuances of the music.

Just to be clear on what this music is not, here is Ribot from
jambands.com:

 We've done some festivals with many Cubans in the
 audience. I think a third of them thought it was ridiculous
 and walked out. But the rest thought it was funny and
 enjoyable. These songs are standards in Cuba. But we are
 doing them very weird compared to how they are normally
 done. It's like hearing someone do a weird version of the
 Beatles or Duke Ellington. Imagine if I left a cassette of
 The Beatles with a bunch of pygmies and then the cassette
 player broke. But they tried to perform the Beatles record
 anyway. Our songs bear the same relation to Cuban music as
 the Pygmies' music compared to the Beatles.

Who is responsible for this music ?  The original music and
lyrics are by Arsenio Rodriguez, who wrote it in the early
1940's. There is a good story, which may even be true, that
says he arrived in New York from Cuba and the doctor told
him that it was impossible to restore his eyesight, and
shortly thereafter he dictated the song to his brother.  The
recording I worked from is on Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos
Postizos (1998 Atlantic), which can be purchased at
marcribot.com.  It was recorded at Water Music, in Hoboken;
it has that inimitable Hoboken sound.  In an interview,
Ribot gave great artistic credit to the producer JD
Foster. Ribot plays the guitars. Brad Jones plays bass
(included in the transcription). John Medeski plays
organ. Percussion is by Robert J. Rodriguez and E J
Rodriguez.

Engraving System and Notation:

I used the LilyPond music engraving (i.e. typesetting)
computer program.  I spent some hours fighting various
details of the arcane LilyPond markup system and, as is
evident from the score, frequently got the worst of the
fight. LilyPond works a bit like writing a TeX document. You
create a plain text file representing the music notation and
then the computer program processes the file, generating a
score in pdf format and a midi file. 

There are two LilyPond source files for this project,
lveus.ly and lveusbass.ly. Run lilypond on lveus.ly to produce
the midi and pdf score (the midi will be wrong; see below.)

Currently the goal of separating structural commands from
layout commands is not in sight in LilyPond. Collisions
between printed symbols are the rule, and a mish-mash of
means that change with software version number are employed
to try to fix them.  I left a large number of collisions in
the score just because I don't want to invest the time to
fix them.

 This is my first transcription, the first time I have
written down music in any notational system, the first time
I have studied chords, etc. I learned most of the music
theory using the "this guy on the internet" method.  My choice
of notating enharmonic pitches is probably often wrong.

  a) Chords and Frets:

  I began putting fret diagrams on the score simply to
notate easily where to put my fingers, because in several
sections Ribot plays a chord or broken chord or arpeggio
with an immobile left hand. I began to put chord symbols
(ie, names G, Am, etc.) over the fret diagrams that
corresponded to obvious chords. Then I began to try to find
the chords for all of the music. The result is that the
chord symbols don't have a single purpose. They may be a
literal interpretation of the fret diagram. They may
represent the chord that I think Ribot and Jones may have in
mind during a bar. They may represent what I think is the basic
chord in the progression without a substitution.

 Instead of fret diagrams, I sometimes use an approximation
of standard classical guitar notation by putting arabic
numerals above note heads to indicate left hand
fingering. Likewise I sometimes use italic roman numerals to
indicate left hand position, and circled arabic numerals to
indicate the string. A zero with a tail is borrowed from
cello notation to indicate fretting with the thumb. I would
like to indicate barres and the duration of positions more
accurately, but all of this is laborious in
LilyPond. Unfortunately, it is not possible include the
standard notation for string bends in transcribed blues
guitar. I have tried to indicate some of this with the word
"bend" and text notes below. I have used a cup above notes
to indicate a quarter bend. These are never really quarter
bends, but indications to listen carefully at that bar for
how the guitarist bends the note.  Slurs indicate hammerons
and pulloffs.  Glissandos are indicated by straight lines
(sometimes too short or misshapen, depending on how much
effort I was able to put into fighting LilyPond), and
represent slides.

Barres are not notated, but should not be hard to figure out.

  b) Articulation: 

I use the tenuto symbol, a bar over a note head, to indicate
that a note is held; a staccato symbol, a dot, to indicate
that a note is shortened; and a portando symbol, a line and
a dot, to indicate that the note is shortened a bit more
than if playing legato or normally.  But they are a rather
crude approximation of the articulation and rubato on the
recording and are merely reminders to listen carefully to
the articulation at that postion in the piece.

Midi:

  The midi is not at all for performance. It is useful for
hearing wrong intervals and rhythms. However, if you listen
to it expecting to find music, you will find anti-music.
Generating the midi was rather complicated: The midi that
LilyPond will generate from lveus.ly will be wrong
dynamically and the the bass and guitar will go out of
sync. I generated the midi from a modified version of the
source file lveus.ly (I didn't upload this modified source
file). I stripped the dynamics from lveus.ly with a perl
script; otherwise the midi is silent in many
places. Glissandos to and from nowhere must be marked by
making glissandos to hidden grace notes. The note is marked
grace so that it occupies no time in the bar. It is marked
hidden so that it doesn't print.  But the software that
converts to midi, not only does not hide grace notes, but
lets them occupy time. So I stripped these commands as well.

Notes on the Music:

The song (the recording of the song by Los Cubanos Postizos)
has an A B A B A A structure with variations in all repeated
parts. Each of A and B is a chord progression.  Bars 1-11
are A and consist of solo guitar, with tremelo and not too
much distortion and probably finger picked.  Bars 12-23 are
B and add spoken vocals.  Bars 24-31 are A played a bit
differently and with sung vocals.  Bars 33-45 are B and are
the guitar solo. The arrangement here uses distorted guitar,
electric bass guitar, organ (or something like that) and
some kind of stick, maybe claves. Bars 46-53 and 54-61 are A
done twice with the same instrumentation as the previous
section but added sung vocals and maybe some other
noises. Bars 62-64 are an outro consisting of solo guitar.

I play bars 1-32 mostly with my thumb and fingers when
necessary.  I use the side of the thumb and a bit of nail
for normal or louder or more percussive notes and rotate the
thumb and use more pad for the soft notes. I play it on a
telecaster with the neck pickup and electronic rotating
tremelo.  I don't know what Ribot uses.  It sounds like he
arpeggiates, at least slightly, every chord, which makes me
think he may be strumming somehow. I play the rest of the
song with a pick and more distortion and no tremelo.

More detailed notes:

bar 4: 
   I need to check this again. It is seems that the
space of five eight notes are occupied by seven even
beats. The notes are all in the GMaj scale except for
Bb. The first five notes form a CMaj7. I wonder to what
extent the choice of the last two notes fits into a
practical theoretical idea.

bar 5: 
   This maybe something like a C#m chord. It is probably
related to the last dyad of bar 4.

bar 7: The first five notes are E7. Almost the same as bar
  27

bar 8:
  The (1, 2, 3b and 5) from A maj scale are here. Very
similar to bar 28.  In bar 8 dyads consisting of minor
thirds above each melody note are present (lowered an
octave). In bar 28, the same notes are present, but with
minor thirds below each melody note.

bar 16:
  If the bass were here, it would be walking chromatically
down from A to F#. One might consider the root to be on A
the whole time, rather than walking down. I think the
chromatically changing root is probably the correct way to
think about it. Anyway I marked the chords both ways.

bar 25:
  This chord has the notes 
  C# G Bb E 
  and can be interpreted as 
  1 3b 5b 6
with any of the four notes taken as the root (with inversions).
Since the chord is arpeggiated, the ambiguity over which is the
tonic may be enhanced.

bar 33:
  Starts with 3,5 of G chord. The 3b appears as well.  These
plain major and minor chords (and distortion and volume)
produce a sudden rocky feel compared to the piece up to this
point.

bar 34:
  G Maj, or Gmin ?  Not clear whether this is a major or
minor or blues scale. Other than (1,3,3b,5) only 2, the A
appears.  The bass plays (1 3 5) of G Maj. An alternate
position, that I prefer, for the notes after the rests is
the tenth position.

bar 35:
  This measure fits well with a strummed B or B7. The bass
player plays 1 and 5 of B. The last note in the measure is
3b, but it does not give a minor character to the bar. The
guitar enters with 7b and 4 of B. Most following notes are
in the G M sc. The 4th and 5th of B are present.

bar 36: 
  Starts with arpeggiating an Am triad, then walks the bass
down.

bar 39:
  This software can't do notation for bends in blues
guitar. Both notes in this bend (written as a slur) are
struck. The first note is struck as a C and bent quickly to
a D. After holding the D, it is lowered quickly and struck
as a C. There is standard notation for this extremely common
blues licklet.

bar 41: Hits all of and only G major scale. This makes an 
 obvious contrast with the blues scale in the previous bar.

bar 42: 
   The notation for the rhythm here is a bit awkward.  The
triplet counts for one eighth note. The actual rhythm steals
somewhere between a 32nd and a 64th from the eighth note. I
wonder if this is what Ribot meant when he talked about
Monk's rubato, I have not listened that closely to Monk.

bar 43: 
   Gu. enters playing (1,3) of B. Descends chromatically to
B and descends here with (1 5+ 4 7) then ascends
chromatically to E for the next bar. Bass plays (1,3,5,7b)
of B.


bar 46:
  Can barre with 3rg f. . An alternate fingering is to play
g-3 and barre c-4 e-4