Learning about Orchestration

The kids and I were listening to the Beatles "1" CD in the van. It came to "Come Together" and about a minute into the song it struck me. There is hardly any guitar or keyboard in it. The accompaniment consists of mostly drums and a very loud bass guitar. In fact the bass made the whole van vibrate! There are a couple of guitar riffs in the song and then there is a guitar solo at the end, but not much more. Very unusual, I said and Supriya agreed.

On the way back Supriya asked me to play the song again ("that song with the loud bass"!). After that I went back and played "Hey Jude" and we went over its orchestration. It started very minimalistically with just lead voice and piano, but then we listened carefully and checked off the other instruments as they came in one by one - tambourine, backup voices, drums (& cymbals) and finally the bass guitar. I feel very good about this discussion with Supriya.