An Interview With the Man Behind Dylanchords
I was recently interviewed by fellow Substack writer Ray Padgett. As an interlude between the regular posts, here’s a slightly updated version of that interview
For as long as I can remember, I’ve signed my emails with a single “e”, a subtle but obvious reference to the double Es of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”. This is probably the corniest segue possible into saying: I was interviewed recently by Ray Padgett, who writes the immensely successful and content-rich substack colleague Flagging Down The Double E’s. Just how successful his newsletter is was proven by the flood of new subscriptions after the interview was published last month. Many of you will therefore have read the interview already, but just so that there will be something for you as well, I’ve added some questions and expanded some of the answers.
So here goes: Ray Padgett’s conversation with “The World's Foremost Expert on Bob Dylan's Guitar Playing” (his words, not mine).
Why did you decide to start Dylanchords? Had you been tabbing stuff out for your own use or elsewhere before the website?
In 1996, my department (Musicology, Uppsala University) got an Itnternet connection, and I started a webpage. [Below is the first snapshot of it that is stored on the Wayback Machine. I had completely forgotten that there was initially an Esperanto version of the webpage as well.]
I had tabbed some of the songs that I wanted to play that weren’t available on the usual sites, or where the chords were so wrong that it was just a waste of time to look them up. I put them up on the site, on a sub-page, which I therefore called “My Back Pages.” (Later on, I discussed the name with Karl Erik Andersen of Expecting Rain, and he suggested dylanchords, because, hey, it’s about Dylan, and it’s chords.)
In 1997, Time Out Of Mind came out in Sweden on a Friday and in the rest of the world on the Tuesday after, so I spent the weekend tabbing and extending the site, so that the whole album would be ready when the album reached the world. That’s when the site was born for real.
[I should add that I spent quite some time on the layout of the site, making it look as much like the album art as possible. This was advanced web layout at the time:]
Can you give an overview of how you go about tabbing a song?
First step is determining which chord family is being used [that is: are we playing with C chords, G chords, E chords or something else], which in practice means figuring out if and where there is a capo. If the song is guitar-based, this is usually quite easy, since the different chords sound so different, because of how the tones are distributed over the strings: C is a tight chord, with no air between the tones: very full and sonorous. D tends to sound thin or ringing because of the pronounced third (f#) on the top string, and since one can not use the bottom string (unless one plays Drop D, which is just as recognisable with the full, booming sound). G – my favourite – has the full bottom, and the high keynote on the top, and lots of room for melodic detail on the intermediary strings. And so forth.
If I’m doing just the chords, it’s usually very easy. Having a working knowledge of music theory and the relationship between chords also helps. I usually tab with a guitar on my knee, but for the simpler songs I may not even use that. [As an example, I can reveal that I tabbed all of “Knocked Out Loaded” (minus Brownsville Girl, which had already been done) one late evening when I dropped by my university office on my way home from a very wet tour of the town – not quite Knocked Out, but very Loaded.]
Anything beyond plain chords requires close listening, to figure out fills, strange fingerings, weird chords, etc. At this stage, open strings are useful, and so are slides, hammer-ons, etc – all those things that indicate that this has to be played in a particular way, at a particular place on the neck. I write a little about this in the “Dark Eyes” issue of Dylanology. For this I sometimes use a tool called Transcribe!, where one can slow down without too much loss of sound quality, isolate left/right channels, remove the vocals, get a spectrogram and a “keyboard” notation of which tones may be in the mix, etc.
I rarely use videos, but occasionally it can be useful to check if this or that chord is indeed played higher up on the neck or if that lick is played with the index or middle finger.
For most artists, there is no equivalent to Dylanchords. Ultimate Guitar and places like that are so hit or miss. What makes yours better? Are there certain mistakes other tabbers make, about Dylan or anyone else?
Aw, this is a tough one, because I hate to be impolite. But let me start in the other end: do I have an idea why I am always dead on? Yes: (a) I am good at music theory, (b) I play the guitar decently well, so I know how the chords sound and how to produce them, and (c) I listen carefully before I write anything down. You could probably add a touch of OCD too (at least metaphorically speaking).
In other words: I care. The mistakes that people make, then, fall in the same three categories: (a) bad understanding of music theory, resulting in wrong chords and no sense of what is important and what is not; (b) the “Hal Leonard” disease: expensive, officially licensed sheet music produced by some publishing house arranger who tries his best to make piano scores that might mimic Dylan’s guitar playing on “It’s Alright Ma”; and (c) sloppy, careless complacency, not giving a damn whether it’s a Dm or an F, or whether a chord should be written G# or Ab.
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