Intensive 20 DVD Guitar Training Course

• Blackbird - Sheet Music (Digital Download)
  
  Performed by: The Beatles: Blackbird Scorch file - instantly downloadable sheet music, scoring: Guitar Tab, instruments: Guitar; 4 pages


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  The Beatles - Complete Scores By The Beatles. Complete score songbook for voice(s), guitar(s), bass guitar, drum set and keyboard. Popular boxed gift set. Includes complete transcriptions of all instrumental and vocal parts. Series: Hal Leonard Transcribed Scores. 1136 pages. Published by Hal Leonard. (HL.673228)
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  Fingerpicking Beatles (30 Songs Arranged for Solo Guitar in Standard Notation & Tablature) By The Beatles. Guitar tablature songbook for guitar solo. 63 pages. Published by Hal Leonard. (HL.699049)
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Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.

Blackbird fly blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird fly blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Origins

McCartney revealed on PBS's Great Performances (Paul McCartney: Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road), aired in 2006, that the guitar accompaniment for Blackbird was inspired by Bach's Bouree in E minor, a well known classical guitar piece. As kids, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bouree as a "show off" piece. Bouree is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney adapted a segment of Bouree as the opening of "Blackbird," and carried the musical idea throughout the song.

The first night Linda Eastman, who would later become his wife, slept over, McCartney played it to the fans camped outside his house.

Composition and recording

The song was recorded 11 June 1968 in Abbey Road studios, with George Martin as the producer and Geoff Emerick as the audio engineer. McCartney played a Martin D 28 acoustic guitar. The track includes recordings of a blackbird singing in the background.

The structure of the song is quite uneven, featuring a good amount of free verse phrasing, with the timing varying between 3/4, 4/4 and 2/4 metres. It is in the key of G, with the bass and melody lines on the guitar progressing mostly in parallel tenths, all the while maintaining an open G-drone on the third string. The song is played with a unique combination of fingerpicking and (a kind of) finger-strumming, though the bass notes are always played by the thumb on the downbeat.

The song starts with an intro whose chords progress through I-ii7-I6/3 up to the I chord played an octave higher. The verse begins with the same progression before moving into a long phrase starting on the IV chord with the bass notes ascending in half-steps up to the vi chord, before descending (also in half-steps) back to the IV. They descend still further back to the I chord, before launching into an instrumental interlude, a shortened four-measure recounting of the verse. The second verse follows, though this time it skips the interlude, going directly into the refrain.

An instrumental reprisal of the verse, followed by the refrain (with vocals), leads back into the intro phrase whose last chord is repeatedly played for a couple of measures before making way for the introduction of the birds-chirping overdub. There is another brief instrumental interlude, which contains phrases from the intro and the verse, before going into a reprisal of the first verse and ending with an outro, containing the same sequence of chords as the first interlude.

Besides the vocals, guitar and bird-overdub, the recording also consists of an audible clicking sound that provides the beats of the song. According to Mark Lewisohn, this sound on the track (left channel) which sounds like McCartney's foot tapping is actually a mechanical metronome.

In fact, it was indeed Paul's foot tapping, incorrectly identified as a metronome in the past, as the tempo fluctuates between 89 and 94 bpm throughout the song.

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