Fell On Black Days

Soundgarden’s fourth album, 1994’s Superunknown, proved to be their breakthrough record, producing two Grammy Award-winning singles (“Black Hole Sun” and “Spoonman”) and reaching sales in excess of six times Platinum status.

“Fell On Black Days” was the album’s fifth single, fairing well in the US, but not making much of an impact on the charts elsewhere.

Soundgarden – Fell On Black Days

I was only vaguely aware of “Fell On Black Days” until one of my students brought it to me because he wanted help in figuring out the time signatures (that’s right, there’s more than one meter here!). The more I listened to it, the more I became obsessed with notating everything in the bass part and solving Soundgarden’s rhythmic riddles.

“Fell On Black Days” bass performance notes:

While Ben Shepherd’s bass part isn’t technically that hard, there are some areas that make this more challenging that many other grunge songs:

• The main riff is in 6/4 time, which is played and felt like a regular bar of 4/4 with two extra beats. Thankfully, the verse riff is mainly made up of eighth notes, so the counting shouldn’t be too stressful here.
• The figure that follows the verse at bar 11 is awkward at first, but once you’re “in on the joke”, then you’ll be able to breeze through it when it gets recycled later on in the tune. It’s worth flagging up that bar 12 isn’t exactly in time (it’s more of an 11/8 bar), but I doubt that the band recorded the song to a click, and there’s a drum fill on the last beat of the bar to bring you back in.
• The chorus features both F naturals and F sharps in the same bar, so it might take a couple of passes to get everything 100% accurate.
• The second half of chorus 2 (bar 29) features an octave pedal, which is pumping out a note an octave below the one written. It sounds like the pedal is set to 50:50 wet and dry signal, so you can hear both octaves on the recording. You’ll notice that Ben Shepherd avoids anything below a B here, as octave pedals tend to track poorly below this point on the fretboard.
• The guitar solo (bar 46) is written in 10/4, a meter that you won’t often see. I really tried to avoid writing in bars of 10, but there wasn’t a better alternative.