Opeth - Patterns in the Ivy

tablature

The two-minute piece leading up to the title track of Blackwater Park. Having few unique parts, it can make for a good opportunity for dialing in the details of how you play it. My recording of it was made in four parts, then pieced together with slight alignment in an off-beat place or two. Some small volume and filter cuts were also made in a few places. The original song can be played in E standard, this version is in D standard.

Theory

Starting at the first voicing, you might see either an A power chord or an open chord with another interval at the top, a major second above the root’s octave. Seeing no third, you could label it a suspended chord, Asus2. While sliding up, you can hear what rings together isn’t all that different from what was before it. Thus, leaving the root on A, you could see the degrees are a minor seventh and a minor third, while the major second stayed, yielding an Amin7^9 chord.

The next chord is an Fmaj, which would fit into a minor key (aeolian mod), as the interval from A to F is a minor sixth, and on that degree of a natural minor scale we should find a major chord. Sliding up the Fmaj shape one fret, there does not seem to be an obvious function for the resulting chord, even after the part following it is interpreted, so I just labeled it a temporary chord. Whoever composed could have found it randomly, and in either case, it sounds great here. Moving on, if we try to take the lowest note of the voicing as its root, we find a G minor triad, except for the temporary movement up from the major second to the minor third. In that A to A# movement, the A# seems to determine the mood of the voicing, but it does not fit into A aeolian, as it is a minor second of it. However, if everything else fits, there is a modal change that could explain this specific change, which is going from A aeolian to A phrygian, since lowering the major second of the scale to a minor second is all we have to do to get there.

The last chord before the return to Asus2 is a bit trickier. Taking each note to be the root, and checking the intervals of the rest against it, we don’t find any obvious explanation for its function. If we try looking at the next chord for help, we could hear and suspect some kind of resolution. We could try if one of the most common ways of resolving to the tonic chord could work here, which would be resolving from the fifth degree. The first degree here would be a minor chord from an A aeolian scale, and the fifth degree of that scale we should find an Emin7, but taking E to be the root of the voicing, we find a major third, not a minor third. However, this is a sign of the potential presence of a harmonic minor scale, which is something that’s not easy to come up with on your own, but once you know about it, you start seeing it in quite a few places.

More concretely, taking E to be the root of the chord, from lowest, to highest, we get a major third, either an augmented fifth or a minor sixth, the root, and a fourth. The notes that follow it fit into the A harmonic scale as well. The last note, which is an octave above the first, can also help us realize that it does not fit into an A aeolian scale, but it does fit into an A harmonic scale, which has a raised seventh in comparison. The only note that sticks out from the dominant chord we would expect to find at that degree is an augmented fifth instead of a perfect fifth (yielding an augmented chord), but that is a common alteration on dominant chords.

The next time we diverge from this sequence is with a downwards movement in the bass note while picking D and G on top. The whole walk down has a minor or diminished ring, if you take the notes to be relative to A. The interesting bit comes afterwards, though, when we jump to a Bmaj arpeggio. The most basic explanation of fitting into the A aeolian scale is off the table, as it differs significantly from the diminished triad we would find there (keeping to three tones here, as the Bmaj did not have a seventh degree). Thinking about this as a movement from the Amin before to Bmaj, we could try to find a scale they both fit into by looking at the chord sequence of a diatonic scale, but we won’t find these two types separated by a major second there. However, if we try the same with a harmonic minor scale, we find that it could accomodate the Amin and Bmaj chords as its fourth and fifth degrees, and that would be the E harmonic minor scale.

After repeating that A aeolian walk down, the notes in the following part fit into A aeolian or E aeolian with the exception of the chromatic descending motion on the B string, so the part could be seen as blending between the keys of the parts which precede it.