Bass transcription: The Police – “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”

Released as the second single from The Police’s fourth album, Ghost in the Machine (1981), “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” gave the band an international hit, topping the UK charts and reaching No.3 in the US. The track marks a departure from the trio’s sound on their previous three albums due to the heavy layering of piano and synth parts – apparently guitarist Andy Summers felt that the band were moving too far away from their original sound, but the track’s commercial success showed that fans of The Police didn’t object to the shift in direction.

The recording that you hear was built around Sting’s original demo, with guitars, piano, and drums overdubbed on Sting’s backing track as he felt that the band couldn’t capture the energy and spirit of the demo recording. Stewart Copeland’s drum track was allegedly done in one take:

The Police – “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” bass transcription PDF

“Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” bass performance notes

The song has a number of quirks that make it unusual for such a successful pop hit:

  • The recording sits about a quarter-tone sharp of standard tuning, making it in the key of ‘D-and-a-bit’ major. You can either pitch-shift the track using a DAW if that’s a thing that you’re comfortable with, or it might be quicker to tune your bass a quarter tone sharp.
  • The intro/verse bassline and chord progression is notable, as it uses the Lydian mode: we’re in the key of D major, but the song starts on a G major chord, giving us the sense that G is home. Sting’s bassline then ascends G – A – B – C#, giving us the sound of a major scale with a raised 4th. We don’t arrive at the real tonic (home chord) until the end of the verse.
  • Sting’s bass part at the end of the verse (bars 10-13) is quite busy, as he navigates the rapid chord change of G – A – D. If you listen carefully to the piano part here, you can hear that the phrase has a subtle shift in the rhythm of the chord changes – they’re off the beat the first time, then land on beats 3 and 4 the second time.
  • The chorus features a dramatic shift in both time and genre – suddenly, we’re in a double-time reggae/calypso feel, with Sting using sparse, major triad-based ideas to support the repeated change from A to D.
  • At the end of the chorus (bars 21-22), there are some chords that don’t belong in the key of D major, but they somehow sound acceptable to our ears. The technical term for this is modal interchange (a.k.a “borrowed chords), and we’ll see lots of it later on.
  • By the time we get to the third chorus (bar 58), Sting has started to treat us to some neat variations on the original bassline; note the quarter-note triplet in bar 61 and the additional B – E movement in bar 69, which implies Bm – E – A (it’s a ii – V – I progression in disguise!)
  • The outro (bar 73) signals a real shift in harmonic and melodic direction – the chord progression uses more modal interchange, borrowing harmony from the parallel key of D minor, before returning us to the home key of D major. The vocal also shifts to Sting patented “ee-oh-oh” lyric (I doubt many other people could get away with that one).
  • Almost all of the chord changes in this section are pushed, arriving on the ‘and’ of beat 4. Sting also tends to slide into the root notes of the Gm and Am chords, while bars 105 and 109 feature perfect 5th double stops on the F chord
  • The end of the outro (bar 129 onwards) signals yeat another change of feel and harmony – this time we have a Bossa Nova-type root–5th figure underneath a static D major chord; notice how Sting develops his part to hint at a D major 7 sound before moving back to the verse progression as the track fades out.
  • If you’re a Sting/Police afficionado, you might well recognise the lyrics “Do I have to tell the story / of a thousand rainy days? /It’s a big enough umbrella / but it’s always me who ends up getting wet” from both The Police’s “O My God”, and Sting’s “Seven Days”.