Andy Partridge is my favorite song writer, ever.
His new book "Complicated Game" shows how he wrote 30 great songs.
Last night I read how they did "Beating of Hearts". Every string on the guitars was tuned to the same note. They got these unique sounds - barring the frets, all the same notes. They played an electric signal through the board, and also had a mic near the strings to capture the acoustic sound of the strings at the same time. The drummer was asked to come up with an "India" beat.
The interviews for this book are also on-line:
http://chalkhills.org/articles/XTCFans20080428.html
AP: Well, I always wanted to do something with that buoyant, bobbing rhythm, but the whole song really came from the guitar tuning. I'd read somewhere that
The Glitter Band had got the sound on their guitars by tuning every string to the same note, which they then played through a distortion pedal with a bottleneck. So, instead of chords, you had six notes [chuckles] sort of overdubbed simultaneously, if you see what I mean. I thought, "Well, that's a fantastic sound! I wonder what it's like to mess around with." So I just tried it -- I tried tuning every string to the note of E. I'd heard that they tuned to the note of A, but I thought I'd try it with E.
So, I was dragging the plectrum across the strings, and it sort of made a rhythm as you played -- drrrr-lang, drrrr-lang. Because it was all the same note.
TB: Right, but slightly different timbres, because you have different weights of strings.
AP: Different weights and thicknesses of strings, yeah. And then you just throw your hand on, in a straight barre, and you're playing -- well, not quite chords, because at best they can only be octaves of each other. So, they're not chords, and their not single notes, what are they? They're something else.
Many more, not in the book:
http://chalkhills.org/articles/XTCFans.html
