Chris Squire Bass Transcription: The Revealing Science of God

PDF now here https://tinyurl.com/RSOGBass

I feel that, for all its noisiness, The Ancient is the most musically accomplished of the four Topographic movements. RSOG is an uneasy mashup of a handful of different songs, and I agree with Rick Wakeman that it suffers from a lack of editing. Unlike Close To The Edge, many more ideas were thrown into the piece, instead of the band working to arrange fewer elements more interestingly. So for much of the time, Chris is looking for something to do, and seems to be banging out octaves, or trying to inject some rhythmic life into the band’s continual noodling up and down on boring major scales.

The concept of RSOG is almost programmatic, something of a creation myth mixed with the idea of the passage of a day from sunrise to sunset, and despite the padding, there are some great moments. There is the Fa-Mi-Do theme that runs throughout, and which Chris picks up in the bass at various points (not always in the same key as everyone else); the “Move Fast” and “What Happened” elements that find some stature in the final grand recapitulation; and the “Old Fighters Past” sequence, which was, at one point during rehearsal, far more uptempo. Perhaps it’s not Chris’s finest 22 minutes, insofar as the track, like much of the album, is a collection of Steve Howe extended guitar suites that Chris and Rick support, but don’t really contribute to. If anyone’s working his socks off here, it’s the new boy Alan.

In terms of scoring, as usual I apologise for the inevitable fluffs. The bass isn’t always easy to distinguish from the guitar, or the snare, and sometimes its own overtones may have led me to mishear which octave was being played; alter your EQ if you’re having trouble. I have tried to suggest expression here and there, but some lesser-value notes should probably be grace notes, and vice versa; nor, probably, have I included every single glissando.

The chants at the beginning and the end might have been better left without time signatures, but I had something of a dilemma; it’s clear, if you take the bass in isolation, that it’s always moving in a compound time direction - indeed, when played live, Alan plays a 6/8 on percussion to count in - but the chant itself doesn’t obey this. In the end I felt it was best to let the chant suggest the count, and leave the bass looking oddly syncopated; the 6/8 feeling on bass really kicks after “as fast as misued expression”. I included the vocal line (Jon and Chris’s parts) and lyrics so you can just play whatever’s under which particular word, if that helps. For the closing chant, the bass was almost impossible to hear, so what you see is guesswork at best.

Bars 39-40 (02:26)- not sure if Chris is strumming these bits really fast, or whether it’s the drums.

Bar 123 (06:51)- again, this is probably Steve, not Chris, but it sure sounds like the bass.

Sorry for my rudimentary video editing skills. Please offer criticism and suggestions - it will make for better future transcriptions!