Good evening, everybody. Good evening from Kunshan, China, where I live and work, and where I have just completed my ongoing project recording cover versions of all the Beatles songs from A to Y. I just finished the last song on the list, which is “Your Mother Should Know”, and with that song, I complete this project and give it over to the world, for better or worse. So I thought since I had just completed the project, I might share some words about it, why I did it in the first place, and what I feel I've gotten out of it, maybe what you can get out of it too, if you're a musician especially.
So let's start with why I decided to do this crazy project, which is covering all the Beatles songs from A to Y. I think the first inspiration was when I picked up this book recently. It's called The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook, and it's one of many Beatles songbooks that I own and that I've collected over the years. But this is definitely, I would say, if you're going to buy one Beatles songbook, this is it. It's really a wonderful book. It's not perfect. No songbook is going to be perfect, but you can see how it has the chords, the lyrics, the chords.
Obviously, you have to know the tunes to play them. So you can go through this book, basically song by song, and play each song in the original key, or if like me, sometimes you have to transcribe the song or transpose it to a different key because it might be too high for you in the case of some of the Paul songs. I've tried my best to play all the songs in the original key, but sometimes I had to go low.
So I think it was with this book that I got the inspiration. I was going to go through the entire book and play all the songs, and then I decided, hey, why not record myself playing them? Because you can always learn a lot by recording yourself playing songs if you want feedback on your songs, listen to the recording, maybe make adjustments to your playing and so forth. I think the other thing that I like about recording songs as a musician is that it kind of forces you to really hone the song so that you can play it smoothly, especially if you plan to release it to the public on Facebook or YouTube or some other social media, and so that your friends and family or the public at large can see the products of your work.
Of course, you want to hone the songs and make them listenable. So recording yourself playing songs until you get them to play smoothly is, I think, a good practice for any musician, regardless of your level, regardless of whether you are a non-professional musician like myself or a professional musician. I think it's a good thing to do. So the other reason I did this was because I've been, you know, as I've explained in other videos I've made, I've been a lifelong Beatles fan. I've been a fan of the Beatles ever since I was four or five years old. They've been a big part of my life. They've been kind of the archetype of music for me. They are the, you know, the band that I always refer back to in my mind, and I thought it would be a good practice to systematically go through all their songs, even though it can feel a bit tedious to do that. Up until this time, up until I started this project, I should say, I knew quite a few Beatles songs.
There are a few that I had under my belt either playing on guitar or on piano. I would say somewhere between maybe a quarter and a third of the songs in the Beatles canon I already was accustomed to playing and singing. Some of them I know quite well, some of them I play frequently. They're kind of a part of my repertoire. Others I had played occasionally or had tried out before, and then there were others that I had never played in my life. There were many that I had never tried out before. So that was interesting, learning songs that I had never tried to play, partly because, you know, some of the Beatles songs are just kind of less attractive to musicians who just want to play them on guitar or piano. Others are very attractive. Some are like, you know, must-haves for any guitarist or piano player who likes the Beatles, and others are kind of maybe a little bit obscure, or they just don't lend themselves well to covering them, especially as a solo artist.
So it was interesting to go through all the songs and find out that actually all of them, every single one sounds pretty good. Mostly I played them on guitar. There were only a few cases where I decided it was best to play the song on piano, but mostly I was playing them on guitar, and I was thinking that when Paul or John or George wrote those songs, they wrote them using a guitar, or in Paul's case, sometimes a piano.
So they started by writing the songs using a guitar or a piano and just playing them for themselves, and then they added all the panache to the songs, the orchestration, all the finishing touches, the vocal harmonies, all the wonderful packaging that makes them beautiful Beatles songs. But I think one thing that I love about the Beatles and all great music is that when you strip away the fancy packaging, you still have a great song. You don't need all that fancy packaging to have a wonderful song. I mean, what does a song come down to? It comes down to three things. A great song, or any song, really comes down to chords, melodies, and lyrics. And that is where I think the Beatles really shone as great artists.
In all of their repertoire, there is not one song in their entire repertoire that isn't interesting in its own right, that doesn't have some unique feature to it. And I'm not, again, I'm not talking about all the bells and whistles, the orchestrations, the fancy, the vocal harmonies and all that, which is wonderful, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about the basic structure, the chords, the verses, the bridges, et cetera, the basic melody, the lyrics.
Every single Beatles song has some kind of unique twist to it. There is no Beatles song that just takes a boilerplate chord sequence and puts some good lyrics on it. No, every single song has interesting lyrics written over very interesting and unique melodies and chord changes. So they may be based on some fundamental kinds of music or styles, like, you know, a lot of Beatles songs are blues-based, but there's no Beatles song that doesn't take a little twist, interesting kind of unique twist, to that basic blues form and turn it into something new. And that was, I think, their genius as songwriters. And you really feel that when you go through each of their songs and try to replicate them, at least the most fundamental features of the song.
So I think it's a wonderful exercise for any musician who loves the Beatles to try to go through all their songs. Again, it could be seen as a very tedious act. It certainly takes a lot of time. I devoted about one and a half to two hours a day to this task, and it's taken me a couple of months to complete it. I was probably, at first, I was trying to get in three songs a day, usually in the morning. So I would line up the songs, whatever was next in the alphabet. There are different ways to do this. I suppose you could do it by album by album, from their earliest albums to their latest albums. That would be another way to do this project.
I just chose to do the A to Z method because of this chord book, so I could just go through each song. There are some songs in this book that I did leave out, and those are the more obscure, I would say, earliest songs that were never recorded on albums that we only heard later when the Anthology albums came out. Those songs were never really a part of my childhood or growing up. I didn't really learn about them until later. I don't cherish them the way that I cherish all the songs that went on to the album. So all the songs that I chose were on all of their major albums.
So I would say there might be a dozen or more songs in this songbook that I left out, but pretty much if it's on a major album, I covered it. So I feel it's a good exercise. It's something that musicians can consider, especially if they love the Beatles. You have to love the Beatles, obviously, to undertake such a project. It's not an easy task. I'm sure there are many great musicians out there who are capable of doing it, but it does take a lot of time and patience and persistence. I did it literally every day for the last two months. I did not miss a day. So you have to work through, maybe you're feeling sick, maybe your voice is not feeling that great, maybe you're pressed for time, maybe you're feeling fatigued for some other reason. I think most musicians who are working musicians are probably used to working through all of those issues. But for me, it also meant sacrificing practicing other songs from other musicians, which I normally do in a day, and just focusing on the Beatles.
I think my method was pretty simple. I would wake up in the morning. Sometimes I would just go through the songs the night before just to kind of get them fresh into my mind, work out any kinks in the songs, any difficulties, and then I would play them in the morning. Usually I would run through the song once or twice before recording it. Sometimes I had to do a few takes before I got it right. So I would say each song from start to finish maybe took about 30 minutes of my time. Some of them I could get maybe on the first take after a little warm up because I'm used to playing them. Others, playing them for the first time, it may take a couple of takes to get it smooth. None of these are perfect. I don't think there's any such thing as perfection in covering music. And I did sometimes allow little flaws to creep into the songs, which you might hear if you listen to some of these songs. But my goal was not to make them perfect, but to make them smooth, to make them from start to finish, that if somebody wanted to listen to it, it would be a continuous, smooth process. The Beatles themselves made mistakes, which is part of the fun of listening to the Beatles.
You can listen to the little mistakes that they make, and some of them are kind of enshrined in Beatles lore. And I think that's true of all recorded music. So yeah, the little imperfections kind of sometimes make the recordings even a little more fun. But the goal is to play through them smoothly, to at least get down the basic chord structure, verse and chorus structure, the bridge, all the fundamental features, the melody, the lyrics. In some of the songs, I went in using GarageBand and I added vocal harmonies. Some of them I used, I actually have two of these melodicas and I would use them to substitute for solos because I really didn't have time to learn the solos of like George Harrison, and I'm not a solo guitar player to begin with.
I don't spend a lot of time learning guitar solos. That's really not my thing. I'm a singer. I use guitar and piano to accompany my singing. So the focus was on singing and on just getting the chords, the chord changes, and backing up the vocals. But this came in handy and my other melodica as well came in handy when adding some little enhancements. So that was fun. That was a fun part of the project, but it took a lot of time. And eventually I decided, as I got towards the final stretch of the project, I kind of decided just to go with the recording itself and not add a lot of bells and whistles to it and just make it a very simple acoustic cover, which I think is very much in the spirit of this project, which is also to demonstrate how the Beatles songs work well no matter how you perform them, as long as you get the basic elements, the fundamental elements down.
So there are all sorts of ways to cover songs, and I just chose kind of the fundamental, the real basics, and try to, you know, emulate them as best I can with whatever instrument that I'm playing, usually piano or guitar. So that's kind of how I went through and did it. There are a lot of great musicians on YouTube who do wonderful versions, wonderful covers of Beatles songs with a lot of complex, fancy, maybe guitar work or piano work, or sometimes they take different interpretations of them. But for me, it was more of a nuts and bolts thing. I want to get the basic song down. I want people to feel that they can sing along or they could harmonize with the song, or if somebody is a solo artist out there, they could play the guitar solo during the song if they wanted to.
So that was kind of my basic strategy for getting through these songs. I didn't have a lot of time, you know, just a few minutes to get each song down and then lay it down as a recording and then work on it a little bit on the computer and then load it up to YouTube. And it's been interesting to see, you know, if there's any reaction to this project. Obviously, I'm an unknown musician and just throwing all this stuff out on YouTube. It's interesting to see. It's kind of like throwing bait into a vast ocean and seeing if any fish bite.
So that's been an interesting process. I have gotten some likes on some of the videos and a few mostly, you know, very kind comments from people, which is always nice. It's always, you know, touching to know that somebody somewhere out there in the world, some other country heard the song, listened to it, thought it was a good cover, you know, gave it a thumbs up. That's always nice. It's interesting to see which songs get the most attention. I'm not quite sure how the whole process works.
I'm not, you know, very well versed in YouTube algorithmics. There are a lot of people who really make a living posting their videos out onto YouTube and they understand all the dynamics of how this all works and how to get people to like your posts and to follow you and all that. And I don't know, it's just not it's that hasn't been my goal. I make a fine living as an academic, so I don't need the extra money from YouTube for my for my work, although it'd be nice. But, you know, it's been interesting to see which songs get more reactions. One thing that I found interesting was that one of the songs that seemed to get a lot of attention relative to the others was “I Am The Walrus”.
And I'm not sure exactly why that song got so many more views than other songs, but I suspect maybe because, you know, a lot of the more obvious songs tend to be covered by a lot of artists, so people are probably used to seeing them being posted. But a song like “I Am The Walrus” probably gets less coverage and it's kind of a complicated song, both lyrically and in terms of the chords. So maybe some people want to know, oh, how did you cover that? What chords did you use to cover that song? I think for that song I basically used the chords that were in this book to cover that song.
So that was one of the ones that got a lot of attention. And there were some others that I thought was, oh, that's interesting. Why is that song getting so much attention? One of them was “I'm So Tired” on the White Album, this John Lennon song. I don't know why it got so many views as opposed to the other songs. But yeah, it was interesting to see the dynamic, to see which songs started getting a lot of, you know, I'm just talking about maybe hundreds or maybe a thousand or more views. I'm not talking about going viral, but the ones that got more attention and the ones that it seems like very few people saw, if any.
So that's an interesting dynamic. Again, if you have insights as to how this whole process works, please let me know. It's not something that I've investigated a lot. This is my first time posting a lot of videos on YouTube. I've kind of posted them, I've posted videos sporadically, but most of them have been about China and not about music per se. So that's been an interesting part of the process. I guess I'm going to leave these videos online and maybe organize them somehow and see where they go, see if they get any more attention or if they just disappear into the ocean of YouTube and social media and are never seen or heard from again. But I can tell you that, you know, if you're a musician and you're interested in undertaking such a project, please do let me know. I'm happy to share tips with you on how to do this, which I already have.
So I would say probably if you're going to try to do this, you better know a lot of Beatles songs to begin with. It's definitely not the kind of project that a musician with no experience singing or playing Beatles songs can achieve. It's just, I don't think, unless you did it really slowly. I wanted to do this in a kind of reasonable span of time, so I devoted, you know, I gave myself a couple of months to complete the project. But I think, you know, I suppose another way to do it would be to do one song a day if you're still learning all these songs. But even that would be challenging because some of these songs really do take a lot of time to get down.
And some of them I've been working on and playing for years and years and still don't feel that I, you know, have a really, you know, I don't know, you know, some of them I feel like, man, I really should know this song up and down, left and right by now. I've been playing it for so many years and yet still little pieces of it elude me because, let's face it, Beatles songs are complicated. Like I said, each song is unique.
Each song has its own unique, like, musical footprint. And there are just complexities to these songs that make them not easy to learn or to memorize or to kind of, you know, become part of your repertoire. So I guess those are the thoughts that I have for now on this subject.
I probably will go on to, you know, record some other artists now because I think I've given the Beatles quite a lot of attention and it's time to move on to some of my other favorite artists. So thank you for your attention. Thank you for supporting this project with your views and your likes and subscribing, etc., etc.
And looking forward to your feedback. Bye, everybody.
( Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai)