Brian Setzer 'Straight Up'
Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 9:18 pm
I sometimes make some small arrangements for the horn sections of bands I play in - nothing very fancy, nice to do though.
This time I set out to arrange 'Straight Up', which sounded (to me ) like a fairly straight-up bluesy song.
First, the key. It seemed pretty obvious the tonic of the song would be 'G': all the fat horn punches and the final note are G's, so that seemed like a safe bet. Quick doodling: this must be G major.
So my first intuition was that this would be just a 12-bar major blues in G: "GGGGCCGGDCGG."
However, the nice catchy recurring bassline turnaround over 'DC' is 'a b c des, d c b a g'. That doesn't seem right. Ha! This appears to be a typical ii-V-I turnaround. The rest sounded about right, so that'd make the progression "GGGGCCGGaDGG" instead.
But this isn't quite right yet either, and this is where I'm starting to get (slightly) confused: in the bars that I so far marked 'G', the G triad (g b d) sounds fine. It'd seem obvious to add an F there and make this a G7, but that doesn't seem to feel quite right - actually, adding an 'E' for some reason sounds much more natural. But how to explain that? I briefly considered notating this as 'e-7' instead - that has the notes I hear (e g b d e), but otherwise doesn't seem to make much sense.
But should I write this down as an G6? That seems weird too. Or perhaps I should just write a G7 and hand-wave the 6th in there? G7+13 perhaps? It all seems so far-fetched for such a simple song.
What do you make of this?
This time I set out to arrange 'Straight Up', which sounded (to me ) like a fairly straight-up bluesy song.
First, the key. It seemed pretty obvious the tonic of the song would be 'G': all the fat horn punches and the final note are G's, so that seemed like a safe bet. Quick doodling: this must be G major.
So my first intuition was that this would be just a 12-bar major blues in G: "GGGGCCGGDCGG."
However, the nice catchy recurring bassline turnaround over 'DC' is 'a b c des, d c b a g'. That doesn't seem right. Ha! This appears to be a typical ii-V-I turnaround. The rest sounded about right, so that'd make the progression "GGGGCCGGaDGG" instead.
But this isn't quite right yet either, and this is where I'm starting to get (slightly) confused: in the bars that I so far marked 'G', the G triad (g b d) sounds fine. It'd seem obvious to add an F there and make this a G7, but that doesn't seem to feel quite right - actually, adding an 'E' for some reason sounds much more natural. But how to explain that? I briefly considered notating this as 'e-7' instead - that has the notes I hear (e g b d e), but otherwise doesn't seem to make much sense.
But should I write this down as an G6? That seems weird too. Or perhaps I should just write a G7 and hand-wave the 6th in there? G7+13 perhaps? It all seems so far-fetched for such a simple song.
What do you make of this?