After a week of twang, double-stops and slapback echo for “All Shook Up” in Marlow at the start of the month, I’m now back in the 80s for a production of Chess in Rickmansworth. We’ve got a great band (15-piece, including bassoon, oboe/cor anglais, french horn etc. for a lovely rich sound) and spent yesterday negotiating the parts…
Ah, the parts… what a nightmare! Not so much the individual parts, which are mostly quite clear, but there are plenty of places where bar numbers in the band parts don’t match up with the conductor’s score, the a, b, c, d etc. bars in between consecutively numbered bars, the bars that are numbered but omitted (eg, 124 followed by 126…), sections being repeated in some parts but written out in full in others, and some bars being missing from all but the conductor’s score (eg, the last 3 bars of Diplomats). These evidently came from the various revisions of the score over the past 25 years, but it still makes the first band call very interesting…
Then there are the vamps… Some sections are marked to be repeated a specific number of times (but are often vamped in practice); others go straight into another vamp. This means that it can take a few run throughs with a particular cast (even with a very good conductor, which I’ve had all three times I’ve played the show) to get used to the timings between sections.
So that’s enough about the logistics of playing together; what about the guitar part? Well, I’m using a few more sounds than last time: clean and compressed, with or without huge 80s chorus, and a stock dirty sound with added flanger (for #3) and extra boost/drive (and some delay) for the big guitar solos (in the extended version of #7 Arbiter – NOT included in the original recording, I’ve only found it in the 2002 Danish cast recording, Nobody’s Side (as per the original recording) and Pity the Child (starting off as per the original, then taking my own route).
Nobody’s Side needs a special mention for the amount of tap dancing required: switching between clean, clean + chorus and dirty on an almost bar-by-bar basis, plus extra gain for the 80s-style tapped arpeggio solo. There’s also plenty of tap-dancing in One Night in Bangkok, which is based around wah-wah single-note funk rhythm, wah-wah on the written chord fills, but sustain-y distortion for the counter melody in the chorus. It’s all too quick to switch the wah-wah off and kick in the distortion, so I’m just holding the wah-pedal in one place for that phrase.
Guitar-wise, I’m using my Hohner (don’t laugh!) Revelation RTX, an early 90s shred machine from one of Hohner’s ventures beyond beginners’ instruments. I love it dearly!. The humbucker + simgle coil combination plus some unusual passive tone circuitry gives me the tonal variation this score needs. It’s also got an early Wilkinson 2-point floating vibrato system, which is great for divebombs (eg, end of the chorus in Where I Want to Be). It’s also pretty light for a full-bodied instrument, and I’m wondering whether this is why it seems to feed back so musically, with the body resonating more readily when near the speaker… it’s making me hope there’s space to have an amp in the pit instead of (or even as well as?) going through a DI box…
And the part itself… lots of long rests in the “classical” bits, so it’s useful to know how things are meant to sound. The rock-y bits are generally more straightforward to play, although there is the “American” motif in #3, which is a long string of quavers (or eighth notes…) based on the D harmonic minor scale (although first time round it’s B harmonic minor) which is written with lots of different time signatures. The pulse is consistent, though, so once you’ve got it under your fingers you can stop counting… It’s worth taking the time to work out fingerings for this: in the B minor version, I start in IVth position and finish in IInd, but there’s a slightly tricky bit in the middle where I need to slide my little finger from 5th fret of the B string to the 6th and then 7th fret to get the #4 into the Bm arpeggio. This motif comes back several times throughout the show, so it’s useful to be able to rip it out anytime. [If I have time, I might even post a video of this passage, so you can see the fingering/slides…]
In my own performance, I’m finding lots of 80s “classical metal” influence: very heavy vibrato on the low strings, pinched harmonics and those dive-bombs! It’s even got a bit of dropped-D goodness (albeit by mistake); a passage appears in the first few numbers of Act I which must have been transposed down, because it’s got a low D as a pedal tone. When the same passage appears near the end of Act II, it’s written in E and feels much more natural to play!
The “Arbiter” solo is still a bit hit-and-miss, but I’m going for a fusion-y Allan Holdsworth kind of thing. The solo in “Nobody’s Side” can only be the tapped arpeggios (Bm -> F#, C#m -> G#), Van Halen-style. For the solo in “Pity the Child”, we’re playing the 4-bar accompaniment four times; I start as per the recording, then go for some more arpeggio stuff (not tapped, though) then finish off a bit more bluesy, with pentatonics and over-stretched bends, before ending with the requisite slow A->B bend over the last chord.
Looking forward to the dress rehearsal tonight (and seeing how we can all cram into the pit!), followed by 6 performances. Lovely!
The Guitar in Musical Theatre 
It’s a question really. Is the bass in Chess an electric bass or acoustic? I suspect electric, but the part doesn’t say.
Thanks for your question David. I’ve only ever played lead guitar on Chess, never on bass.
From the folks playing alongside me, the bass pad is actually written for both double bass and electric bass. However, in most productions, space constraints in the pit and hassle in switching instruments has won out over the different sounds, and they end up playing the whole thing on electric… sometimes before the end of the band call!
THANKS!