By Rick

Buy you tickets for Phish 3D here!

Phish is a singular band. They embody the jam band, their fans are the most loyal and devoted of any modern band, they headline festivals, have managed to turn the letter “f” into the letter “ph”, have jammed with MCs like Jay-Z, and have even leant their name to a psychedelic Vermont ice cream. After a five year hiatus while band members were pursuing solo interests, Phish returned to the touring circuit last year. To their fans, it was if they had never left; the live recordings kept flowing and the crowds kept coming. Now, Phish is poised to do something few bands have done before them: an in theaters 3D concert opening as a limited engagement on April 30th. 

Shot last October at the large Festival 8, Phish drew a crowd of 40,000 and stuck true to their past traditions. The 3D experience will draw from 6 full sets of music, including their first full length acoustic set and their full length performance of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St.  Here at Indaba, we’ve managed to get our hands on an official track from the new movie, “Back on the Train”. In honor of Phish’s normal dive into different and unexpected harmony, we’ve decided to guide you through a lesson on this tune by parsing the harmony and form so you can take it home and practice jamming over it.

Phish- Back on the Train (3D Movie Official Mix)

Download the track here.

So, onto the musical discussion. “Back on the Train” is a blues tinged, piano driven, rock tune. Form-wise, you can call the basic structure a modified 16 bar blues in F:



What prevents this from being a true blues is the exclusion of the V chord, which in F would be C7. Instead, Phish creates a turnaround (or the sequence of chords that leads back to the root) that substitutes chaining dominants for chaining plagal cadences moving b3-b7-4-1 (Ab-Eb-Bb-F). A plagal cadence is a cadence that moves IV-I instead of the ubiquitous V-I. Plagal cadences are extremely common in traditional gospel, country, rock, and pop music. To me, they tend to make songs sound more “pastoral”, or “peaceful”; though, you can certainly think about them differently if you hear them differently.  

The 16 bar blues is something you’ve probably heard many times (for examples, in songs like Cream’s “Sleepy Time Time”, and Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man”). What makes Phish’s version a bit jarring and different is the inclusion of “non-blues” chords, like the Ab major that the Bb major cycles through to get back to F. What this does is give the impression of the flatted third of a “blue” note, while explicitly making it major. Most ears are brought up to recognize major so distinctly that this chord, even though it passes quickly, creates a very effective harmonic feeling.  

In terms of jamming, this song is pretty simple to attack, however, there is no “omnibus” scale that you can play over the whole thing. Here, it’s good to begin thinking about “chord/scale relationship”, which is choosing scales that fit over each chords. In this respect, it is a good tune to start bridging the gap between one scale improvisation into a higher level of thinking about improvisation. So, let’s approach this chord by chord.

F7 makes up the majority of the tune, and is the chord which presents the most possibility. F7 is shorthand for F dominant 7th, which is a 7th chord with a flatted 7th (for a more detailed discussion of 7th chords go here. The scale most associated with the dominant 7th is the mixolydian mode, in this case F mixolydian:



This is, essentially, an F Major scale with a flatted 7th degree. Two other scales that work well over this chord are major and minor pentatonic scales.

F Major pentatonic (also known in the vernacular as the “major blues scale” when there is an added b3), is a simple and great sounding scale. Adding the b3 gives this scale a color too few musicians utilize.



F minor pentatonic is a decidedly darker timbre, yet it is another scale that works tremendously well. Experiment switching between each of the pentatonics and see what you come up with.

For the remaining chords, luckily, they are all major, which means the options are simple. The best way to approach these chords in a Phish context is to use the major scales and the major pentatonics:    



Two more pieces of advice: don’t be afraid of simplicity, and don’t be afraid to copy. There’s something to be said for originality, but when you’re first approaching a tune, especially if you’re a beginner, it’s sometimes best to copy what you can. So, listen to Trey and the rest of the band play over the chords and see what you can do with them!