Al cantar — Platero y Tú (1997)

Why this song

C, G, Am, F. If you have ever picked up a guitar, you already know all four. They hold up hundreds of songs in English and in Spanish, and there are comedy acts built on chaining hit after hit without moving your hand.

What is interesting here is what the song does with them. It does not add a fifth chord to lift the chorus. It leaves them where they are and moves something else.

Historical context

Platero y Tú formed in Bilbao in the late eighties around Fito Cabrales, who sang and played guitar, and Iñaki Antón, known to everyone as Uoho. They recorded their first album in 1991. Through the nineties they were one of the reference bands of Spanish rock, with close ties to Extremoduro: in 1996 the two bands toured together.

Al cantar came out the following year on 7, released by DRO on 29 September 1997. The band produced the record themselves, with no outside producer. That matters for what you are about to hear: the decision to hold back the drums for ninety seconds was not taken by an outsider chasing radio play. They took it.

Photo: Alterna2, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The band split up in 2001, on good terms. Fito had already started Fito & Fitipaldis in 1998 for the songs that did not fit here, and Uoho ended up in Extremoduro. The photographs on this page are from a 2009 Fito & Fitipaldis concert, because no freely licensed picture exists from the Platero years.

Musical characteristics

Pick up a guitar and play C, G, Am, F, four beats each, then start again. That is the whole verse.

Now the interesting part. The chorus does not change chords: it changes the order. It starts on F, then G, then Am. The same four, reshuffled. The closing section puts them in a third order, Am, G, F, C, which is the same road downhill. Three different sections, one handful of chords. When a song gets different feelings out of the same material and the only thing it moves is the order, what you are hearing is the work of the arrangement, not the harmony.

And the arrangement here has one single, very large idea: wait. The song starts with voice and guitar, and stays that way for a minute and a half. No drums keeping time, no bass pushing. Just someone singing with strings behind them.

At 1:29 the rest of the band comes in. The weight of the low frequencies doubles at a stroke and never drops again. Not one chord has changed; what has changed is how many people are playing. That — how many things sound at once and what job each one does — is called texture, and in this song it is the only thing that really moves.

Notice what that does to the words. The first part, the one saying that singing lets you forget the bad moments, is sung by one person alone. By the time "no es placer, es necesidad" arrives, there is a whole band behind it. The music is saying the same thing as the text without a word.

One more thing about the four chords. C is the home chord: when the song lands there, it rests. G is the one that asks to go back, which is why phrases pass through it before closing. A chord that builds tension and pushes back home is called the dominant. Am is the same material as C but darker, and F is the one that opens things up. That particular combination — home, dominant, the dark one, the one that opens — is written in Roman numerals as I – V – vi – IV, and it is the most repeated turn in popular music of the last fifty years.

Hard facts: C major, 4/4, 103 BPM, 4:49. The key and the tempo were measured from the audio of the video below, not copied from a chord chart found online.

Trivia and curiosities

• The chord chart handed out with this article was not written by a publisher: somebody posted it online, dedication and all ("this song is for Nerea, on her 20th birthday"). It shows where almost everything people play actually comes from, and why it is worth checking the key before trusting it.

• All four chords are first position and the chart rates the difficulty as beginner. The song still runs for nearly five minutes without getting dull. How hard something is to play and how interesting it is to hear are not the same thing.

• The band produced the record with no outside producer. Holding back the drums for ninety seconds is exactly the kind of decision a radio-minded producer tends to cut.

• The song is credited to Uoho and Fito. Uoho went on to play guitar in Extremoduro and Fito started Fito & Fitipaldis: two different paths, both signatures on this one track.

• La Fuga, a band from Cantabria, have played it too. A four-chord song travels well: any band can put it together in one rehearsal.

Guided listening

The timings are from the official video in Resources.

• 0:00 — it starts singing almost without preamble. Guitar and voice, nothing else. The song does not introduce itself: it walks in.
• 1:29 — the rest of the band arrives. The weight of the low end doubles and never drops. The chords are exactly the ones from before. The only thing that changed is how many people are playing: that is texture.
• 2:55 — the fullest point of the track. Voice and cymbals both high at once. Compare it in your head with minute one and measure how far the song has travelled without changing chords.
• 4:30 — it lets go. The band drops away and the song fades out the way it came in.

Classroom activities

• Play: C – G – Am – F in a loop, four beats per chord. Guitar, ukulele and keyboard together. Once it comes out without thinking, switch to the chorus order (F – G – Am) without breaking the pulse.

• Sing: the verse sits in a comfortable range and the words are syllabic, one note per syllable. A good place for the whole class to sing without straining, especially for voices that are changing.

• Analyse: a closed question. Listen to the first minute and a half and write down which instruments you hear. After 1:29, write them down again. Which new chord appeared? None. Let them check it themselves.

• Create: take the four chords and build three sections by reordering them, the way the song does. One section has to start on the home chord and another on any other one. Compare which of the two sounds like a chorus.

Key vocabulary

• Arrangement — arreglo
• Texture — textura
• Dominant — dominante, el acorde que empuja de vuelta al principal
• I – V – vi – IV — la vuelta de acordes escrita con números romanos

Resources

Official music video — Warner Music Spain channel.

Guitar tutorial — Musicatulado channel. Takes the four chords and the strumming slowly, and hands out a separate PDF.

Guitar tutorial, simplified version — Fran Brea, Más Que Guitarra school. Cuts the right hand down to the minimum. This is the one to use if someone is still fighting the chord changes.