The Man In The Mirror By Patrick Morley

Learning the Patrick Morley Arrangement

Most people who track down this arrangement are doing it because they heard Morley's version on one of his solo albums and thought the left hand was doing something they wanted to figure out. He plays a Hammond B3-style arrangement with a gospel-funk foundation under the vocal line, and the trick isn't the chords themselves. It's the way he voices the inner movement while keeping the bass line walking independently. Once you see it, it's straightforward. Before you see it, it sounds impossibly busy. The original Michael Jackson song sits in Cminor for the verses and moves into Eb major for the chorus. Morley's arrangement typically transposes it around that same key center but adds extended harmony. You'll hear a lot of add9 and maj7 voicings that aren't strictly necessary but give it that particular Morley texture. The basic framework is: Verse progression: C#m - F#7 - B - E (with variations on the E). Chorus shifts to Eb - Ab - Db - Gb, with Morley often inserting a dim or aug passing chord between the Db and Gb that most simplified charts skip entirely.

If you're trying to learn this by ear, start slow. The tempo is roughly 72 BPM in the original arrangement, which means the sixteenth-note runs in the left hand move at a comfortable pace. Don't rush it. Most tutorials online speed the left hand up to make the performance look flashier, and that just makes it harder to follow along. I spent about three weeks nailinng the left-hand part when I first sat down with this. The issue I kept running into was the thumb crossing on the F#7 bar. Morley uses a 5-4-3-2-1 finger pattern across the lower five notes that sounds simple notated but feels wrong at first because your thumb keeps landing on the wrong pulse. The workaround was to practice the bar in isolation at 40 BPM with a metronome, emphasizing only beats 2 and 4 in the left hand until the crossing felt automatic. Took me about four sessions. After that the rest of the verse fell together quickly. One thing nobody really talks about with this arrangement is Morley's use of the Leslie speaker simulation on the B3. The rotary effect creates a sense of motion in the sustained chords that makes them feel fuller than the actual voicings should. If you're playing this on a piano or a keyboard without a Leslie emulation, the chorus chords can sound thin. I started running my right-hand stack through a basic stereo phaser at low speed and the difference was noticeable immediately. You don't need an expensive organ model. A cheap free Leslie plugin or even a simple tremolo with stereo spread gets you close enough for practice purposes.

Here are the specific voicings I ended up using after trying a bunch of alternatives: C#m11: Left hand C#-G#, Right hand E-G#-B-D-F#. The D gives it that Lydian-ish lift Morley likes. F#7alt: Left hand F#-C#, Right hand E-G#-Bb-D. That Bb is the altered fifth and it's what pushes the tension toward the B minor chord that follows. Bmaj7: Left hand B-F#, Right hand D#-F##-A#-C(which you'll see spelled as E-Gx-B-E in most chart formats). Keep the left hand on the fifth throughout the change. It grounds the harmony without muddying the right hand's extensions. For the chorus in Eb, Morley often doubles the root in the left hand an octave below and lets the right hand carry EbGm7Abmaj7-Db7. The Abmaj7 to Db7 movement is where people tend to rush. Play it deliberately slow. The Abmaj7 should sound like a suspended color before it resolves down to the Db7. If you attack it too hard it just sounds like another dominant chord and loses its function.

One counter-intuitive thing about this piece: the right-hand runs between vocal phrases are actually easier than they look because Morley repeats the same motivic cell with slight melodic variation. There are really only about four distinct patterns across the entire arrangement. Learn the first phrase thoroughly and you've essentially learned sixty percent of what your right hand needs to do. Don't treat every bar as new material. Map out the motifs first, then fill in the variations. The main limitation of this arrangement is that it was originally written for an organ with a full left-hand pedal board or at minimum a strong two-handed keyboard player. If you're doing this solo on piano, the bass notes and inner voicings can get cramped. The workaround I found was to occasionally double the root an octave lower with the left hand pinky on the lower octave keys and shift the chord voicing up slightly. It loses a bit of the low-end weight but the harmonic clarity improves dramatically, especially on smaller keyboards without a wide range. If you're looking for the actual sheet music or a transcription, Morley's version appears on his album Reflections from the mid-nineties, and there are fan-transcribed charts floating around on a few musician forums. The quality varies. Some are accurate, some have the chord symbols wrong on the chorus. I'd recommend cross-referencing any transcription you find against the album itself, bar by bar, especially for the chorus changes where errors are most common. The Verse I's chord progression is usually correct across most versions because it stays closer to the original harmony. The Chorus is where transcribers tend to simplify or mislabel Morley's extended voicings.

The full arrangement runs about four minutes at performance tempo. A typical practice session of thirty to forty-five minutes gets you the verse and chorus hands separately within a couple of weeks. Playing both hands together smoothly takes longer because of the independent movement, but it's not a virtuoso-level piece. The difficulty is in the coordination, not the speed. Someone who can comfortably play intermediate-level organ or Hammond parts will pick this up faster than a pianist who hasn't worked much with independent left-hand lines. Search for The Man In The Mirror By Patrick Morley and you'll find a handful of discussion threads on keyboard forums where people share their own transcriptions. The most useful ones include timestamped video references so you can verify the timing of specific voicings. That's worth looking for rather than relying on a static chart alone. The rhythm of Morley's left hand has a slight swing that isn't obvious from notation and a video reference helps you catch that feel factor much faster than reading standard notation.