I asked Royston after our interviews which of his own songs were the most difficult to learn to play and sing and have subsequently taken it upon myself to learn to play the song he mentioned was a challenge, “Jupiter’s Moon”. I opened my digital audio of the song Jupiter’s Moon and isolated a complete musical loop containing the first line of the first verse
Seems you were looking for to find…
I nudged left and right markers until looping the segment (keyboard shortcut “shift-space”) sounded rhythmically seamless, which indicated to me that eight quarter-notes or two entire measures were isolated.
 |
| Nudging left and right boundaries of the selection until the loop contained nearly exactly two entire measures. |
I then spied in the lower left-hand corner of the audacity window that the timing information was indicated there to six digits of precision.
 |
| Here we see the duration of the selected audio segment – 5.387360 seconds – which permits us to determine the performance metronome tact. |
Having the time-span (denoted below as “bps”) and knowing the number of quarter-notes in the loop (8), we are now able to obtain tempo of the recording in bpm, using a simple formula which I derived here. I only list the result in this article.
89 bpm
Ok then, I got familiar with the counter-points in the song which are obligatory to play while singing with a drummer. I did this with my acoustic guitar using the tempo found above. I played this simpler version with acoustic guitar and sang it a few times until it seemed natural to play the important notes. This step was also good for memorizing the lyrics:
Then, in the course of several evenings in front of the TV, I learned to play the bass-line, striving to play without looking at the fretboard. Then, after much stumbling, I was able to play and record the following video/audio in one take.
Stay tuned, I will be playing this with a compact rock band in the coming spring. Happy Holidays.