I heard my alarm at 7:48 A.M., Columbus Ohio.

My flight left at 6:52 A.M……

Both Malith and I somehow managed circumvent the powers of our alarms when it mattered. Though, we had been up somewhat late the night before. It turned out you could run into traffic jams at 1 AM in Columbus after a Buckeyes game.

First flight I have missed that I remember.  Getting a new flight at the last minute was a mess, something I recommend avoiding that if at all possible! Ended up going to the Dayton airport so I could leave the same day. Kayak.com is the tool I would recommend for finding flights, though getting them last minute can still be a bit expensive.

The night before I was hanging out with my friend Malith and a bunch of his fellow fans of Ohio State. Ohio State played VT and the game was up and down, Ohio coming back to tie it up but then unfortunately losing in the end.

We had talked about getting tickets, but then didn’t happen. The game had 107,000 people in the stadium. Seeing it on the TV with his friends, there was a sea of red going crazy throughout the game.

Earlier

Before we got there to watch the game, we were at Malith’s place watching some other games. And I had my clarinet out.

Hey! This is SaxStation.com, what’s with the clarinet?

I live in California and went to Ohio. You have to pay to check bags on the airplane and even if that’s not an issue for you, checking an instrument can be dangerous for the health of the instrument. Getting an alto as carry on isn’t too bad, but a tenor can be questionable depending on your case.

A clarinet is a great instrument to take on a trip in a lot of cases. I started playing it before the saxophone and played it fairly consistently for the first six years. It breaks apart into five pieces and is quite compact.

So I had my clarinet out and was playing some music I knew, including Fee Fi Fo Fum by Wayne Shorter that I had just gotten on the clarinet a couple of nights before (after having played it on saxophone before).

Then a kind of catchy melody came on in the ‘Experience the New Buick Lacrosse’. Decided to learn it by ear and was playing it as Malith was watching TV. He didn’t notice for a second, but then realized I was playing along.

#ThatsABuick

Simple enough melody with a few notes. Got a few pieces of it, made a few mistakes, then mostly got it.

Enter ‘Hang on Sloopy’

After a little while Malith had an idea, since we were going to watch the Buckeyes game later, he thought I could learn ‘Hang on Sloopy’. So I figured I would try it out. We were supposed to leave in about twenty minutes. He thought his friends would get a kick out of it if I could play this song which has become a fight song for Ohio State.

He looked up a video of it on youtube. A lot of times I’ll use Transcribe to learn music by ear since then I can loop parts and slow things down if I need to, but I didn’t have a computer with Transcribe on it that day. So I just listened to it on youtube a few times.

The song was written in 1964 by Wes Farrell and Bert Russell. In October 1965, with the group ‘The McCoys’ the song was #1 in the US. It became the official rock song of Ohio State and is also popular with teams in Cleveland.

I picked up the first part of the melody fairly easily. Got into the right key fairly quickly, might have even gotten the first note right away.

Then I got the sort of bass part that leads into it.

After that, kept working on it. Came up with sort of a solo version by playing a few parts from different instruments on my clarinet.

A couple of parts were a little tricky. So I played through it and got parts, then was getting more each time. Noticed that one part went up a half step, but was similar to the first part. After about twenty minutes I had most of it. But not perfectly!

To learn music by ear, you mostly just want to jump in. You’ll likely make some mistakes at first. But something that isn’t quite right is better than nothing. And then you keep working on it and things get better.

Figured I could work on the song a little more once I got home and play it on saxophone.

Let me know if you’re interested in learning how to play it, leave a comment!