Throughout my years of teaching Taylor keeps coming up as an artist that students want to study. Some for guitar and others for voice. One of the things that I think is important to appreciate about Taylor Swift is how diverse while prolific she has been. With eight albums released in 14 years since her debut she's covered several genres of music. As I've studied several songs by Taylor one quality stands out above the rest. Her vocal rhythm is stellar in the studio albums. It's apparent that her team really values this in a way that most modern vocalists have lost. To be honest, it makes her work so much easier to transcribe.
Overall, I feel like she's a great role-model for younger musicians. All of that to start looking at I Know Places from the 1989 album.
The intro has a nice modern flavor of excessive auto-tune. This was a tool that was used to help singers that couldn't sing in tune that became intentionally overused in the 2000's. It's refreshing that the pitch correction is reduced throughout the other sections of the song.
Her fills are simple, short, and sweet. They appear in the last four measures of the verse and foreshadow the motif throughout the remainder of the melody.
Vocal harmonies are introduced in the pre-chorus. It's a tasteful progression to use them on the majority of the phrase, but leave the ending as solo. As noted in the chart, the harmonies start above the melody then move an octave below to create wider intervals during the chorus.
The chorus features rests on beats two and four followed by short phrases. Then a massive legato phrase descends on a single syllable. Very fulfilling.
As a final sidenote, most of the time when I slow down recordings for study they get very granular. Bringing audio down to %50 of it's original speed can create all sorts of artifacts that make it hard to understand what is happening. For whatever reason, this recording doesn't do that. I was able to hear very clearly all the way down in the the 30% range. I know that these types of recordings have massive budgets and that's probably a contributing factor. Again, whatever the process, it's fidelity stands out.
I hope you enjoy the chart. It's a fantastic pop song.
Keep playing and enjoy the process.
Christopher
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