Messin’ With The Music Part 19 – ‘Hate To Say I Told You So’

Welcome back to Messin’ With The Music. For this episode we’re covering The Hives ‘Hate To Say I Told You So’. It was originally released as a single in 2000 and is from their album Veni Vidi Vicious. It’s a straight ahead garage rock style song although it has cleaner studio production than you would expect in a lot of songs that fall in to the garage rock category. As with a lot of garage rock songs it’s built on a straight forward beat. There’s a single chord pattern that is used throughout the song with another chord added during the chorus. When you keep a simple chord pattern like that, changes in dynamics are used to make the song more interesting. In this song the dynamic changes are accomplished by adding multiple layers of guitar with different effects such as crunchier distortion. Other areas will drop out the guitar totally to change the dynamics. The vocals also add to the dynamics by being very rhythmic. It’s a fun song to crank up the electric guitar and play along with.

The challenge with doing an acoustic version of this type of song is how to keep a strong rhythm going without the use of a drum kit. In this case we decided not to put any percussion instruments in the song except for a small break in the beginning. A lot of the rhythm during the song is created by playing arpeggios on the mandolin part. There are two acoustic guitars playing the basic rhythm and are panned hard left and right to create the foundation tracks. There is a twelve string guitar that sometimes single strums the chords and sometimes follows the pattern of the other guitars. This was used to change the dynamics throughout the song. Bass is added to give more bottom end. A banjo part is added in a couple of different places for more dynamic change. For those new to this series we followed our basic principles: Play the tracks straight through and use the same single mic for all the tracking.

Although we don’t usually put this in our posts, I wanted to let you know that you can sign up to follow our blog by going to the bottom of the page and putting in your email. You’ll get an email whenever we put out a new post. You can also follow us on Twitter or take a look at our YouTube channel. There are links on the blog page. If you like our posts, please tell your friends. and feel free to comment with suggestion or ideas.

Electrostatic Rhythm Pigs play ‘Hate To Say I Told You So’: