Yes - The Gates of Delirium
0:00 - First section
8:03 - Second section (Instrumental)
16:11 - Third section ("Soon")
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OK, bear with me here because I'm gonna get long-winded on with this one, both musically (well, it IS a 22 minutes-long song!) and in writing.
For me, Gates has always been the most fascinating song from Yes' catalogue. I used to listen to it on loop on bus rides to and from school, and it had always been a fantasy of mine to learn and play it on bass (and with a band, but I still never got that chance).
I started learning and rehearsing the song on-and-off about two months ago. My objective was primarily to do a full length, one-take, no edits video cover of the song; an endurance race, but for bass, of sorts. I also wanted to take the opportunity to study and stay close to Squire's playing, phrasing and tone without having to resort relying on gear using a pick (no disrespect to pick players, I just suck at it).
Here we now are, with my humble (but lengthy!) homage to Yes and to Chris Squire's memory; certainly one of my favorite bass players ever, and me having learnt a lot from this experience on my own playing, memorizing techniques, and the aspects of my playing I want to improve.
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Now, I'm not experienced in writing up musical analysis at all, but still, allow me to share some ramblings and thoughts on what I think are interesting moments from the song - if I got any of this wrong or you have a different point of view to share, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
The "Listen" interlocking pattern;
One could say most of the song revolves around this pattern in different forms. Amazingly, I never managed to figure out if there is any logic in the construction of the rhythmic component of the pattern. Admittedly, I didn't look that deep into it; I think the thing to do would be to break it down into rhtyhmic cells and figure out if there is a pattern to how they're laid out. I ended up memorizing each different iteration as long non-repeating phrases. If anyone knows the secret to it, I'd be curious to know!
1:30 - First iteration; it's three parts here - voices (melody), guitar (melodic counterpoint), and bass+drums (rhythm);
5:49 - The melody part of the pattern takes center stage, supported by a wonderful harmony part from Moraz's mellotron choir (possibly with Jon Anderson's vocals layered in there?); I named the pattern after the lyrics to this section;
6:23 - Melody and rhythm parts now, with an amazing new counterpoint from the mellotron choir; this is an elongated version of the pattern with new chord changes; the pattern evolves over the changes, it does not seem to repeat or reiterate (that I could notice, at least!);
7:11 / 7:21 - Now just the rhythm part with the guitar's melodic counterpoint from the 1:30 iteration;
21:13 - You'd think they'd be done with using the pattern, but it does come back very subtly here (I had never noticed before having to learn the song!) - the rhythm part on the bass + a very soft plucked instrument (could it be Anderson's harp?) or... some sort of glockenspiel. Nice final twist when you're trying to get a perfect run at the song 😃
To go further, one could even argue that many of the other melodic and rhythmic ideas used and developped in the song are variations on this pattern as well - the many rhythmic patterns used across the instruments in the instrumental middle section would be a good place to look, for example.
/// . Other interesting misc. tidbits;
17:41 to 17:56 - The bass part repeats the vocal part in canon for a short while, and joins in unison-ish at 18:00. Caught me off guard the first time I noticed, and I'm still amazed by this little piece of melodic writing on the bass; one of many examples of why I consider Squire a master at composing beautiful bass parts.
18:42 - I'm fairly sure you can hear the wires being "turned on" on Alan White's snare here!
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Huge thanks to Philip Roy for lending me his camera to shoot the video in glorious 60fps, doing some image correction and lending his time to produce the final render.