How to Play Toy & 61 Festival by Hedgehog

If you've never heard of the band Hedgehog, you should check them out.  They are a trio from Beijing, and they've been making some waves over there, especially their tiny powerhouse of a drummer, Shi Lu, who goes by the moniker of Atom.  In fact, all the members of the band go by monikers--the guitarist is ZO, and the bassist is Box.  Why don't people ever just go as "Fred" or something?

I just bought their latest CD, Noise Hit World, and it's pretty good.  If you're outside of China, you can get the CD from Mod in Mod.  They are also available on iTunes and Amazonmp3.com.  How would I describe their music?  I don't know--post punk?  Post New Wave?  These labels are getting more and more meaningless.  I guess you can say that they have a very fresh, pop sound with a splash of punk.

All the tracks are in English with the exception of the last, "bonus" track, which is in Mandarin.  I have the say, the English lyrics are kind of garbled, but they certainly are brave for singing in a language that is not native to them.

Anyway, I'm going to show you how to cover their very catchy lead track, Toy & 61 Festival. What the title means, I haven't a clue.

The song is only four chords--C Am G and F, so it's the key of C.  It's a basic 4/4 song, but it just goes to show you what inventiveness and creativity can do with C Am G and F.  The first thing I did was count out the beats of the song, which ends up being around 144 beats per minute.  Then I fired up Sonar--but you can use any recording software of your choosing--and set the tempo to 144.

The intro to the song is 16 measures:

C    Am    C     Am    C    Am    G   (play twice--2x)

All the chords are one meaure each with the last one, G, taking up two measures.  The opening riff is a very simple but catchy riff played over the D, G, and B strings--it's not hard to figure out, but the thing with simple riffs is that you really need to get the timing right or else it sounds horrible.  I have horrible timing so my cover version really sounds clunky in places.

The first verse is sixteen measures that comprise the exact same chord sequence as the intro:

Verse 1

                          C                       Am 

i can run and jump high in blue sky 

             

                        C                     Am

i hate nature science recognize 

                       C                      Am

i love play my toy and let them fight 

                   G

blamed by mum night i cry 

                        C                     Am

i love bathe in shine rave in night 

                   C                       Am

sing with friends follow your bands' 

               C                   Am

fashion type stylish hair 

                  G

touch your hands make me fun 

The Chorus then follows and is also 16 measures, comprised of this chord sequence:

C    G    Am    F

...so you get this:

         C                 G                  Am                F

when i was a child i can do all things i thought 

     

         C                 G                  Am                F

if i was a child i can try to forget now 

Play this twice.  Each chord is one measure long.  Then you get an instrumental break which is exactly the same as the introduction, so that is another 16 measures.  Then we have the second verse, but this time, it is played only over eight measures instead of 16.  I guess you can also say that in the beginning, they had two verses--each eight measures, and then they have this third verse:

Verse 2

    C                 Am               C                Am

hey baby i am wrong i will never do it again 

   C               Am              G

oh baby i am riot now i just want to be a bad boy(girl) 

Now, this verse has a slightly different melody.  In some ways it functions like a bridge, I think.  Then you get another 32 measures of the verse chord sequence.  Here is where you have some freedom to play whatever you want for the solo.  For the first 16 measures, I did my own thing over C major, and then for the last 16 measures I repeated their opening riff.

Finally, you repeat the chorus again, so that is another 16 measures.  The last part is an 8 bar outro, going over three chords.  When you have a song based on four chords, a very nice thing to do is to end it by using only a three chord progression--it really drives it home:

Outro:

C          G     Am      x4

As you can see, this is the chord progression for the Chorus with the last chord, F, left off.

The reason why I kept mentioning how many measures each part takes is because this is important when you build the song in software like Sonar.  Once I know how many measures the whole song is, and how many measures each part takes, I can lay down the drum part as the basis of the song.

I can't play the drums, and I don't have anyone like Shi Lu to lay down the tracks, so I use loops.  I think the best drum loops on the market is Drums on Demand.  I used a song set from their original Vol 1 collection.

Once you put in the drum track (basically dragging and dropping with drum loops), it's easy to play the guitar track since you now have a drum track to keep time with.  I used my Jay Turser semi-hollow body for the rhythm track.  It was plugged into a POD 2.0 using the 2A "Line 6 Clean" setting.

Once I have the guitar track down, I put in the vocals.  I then add the lead guitar (I used my Fender Stratocaster for this on the "Rectified" 5A setting on the POD.

I always add the bass guitar last.  I think I'm doing it backwards because I think you want to lay the rhythm section down first.  But oh well--I'm not a bassist--I always end up just playing the root notes of the chords.  I use a Yamaha RBX260 for this.  I also feed this through the POD with a setting of "Pre-amp", using a bit of compression.  I bought this Yamaha a while ago because before that I used to lay down a bass track using a midi keyboard.

Here is the finished track:  my cover version of Hedgehogs' Toy & 61 Festival from their latest CD, Noise Hit World.

So, all you kids out there should try it!  Believe me, making music on actual musical instruments is a lot more fun than playing Guitar Hero.