00:00All right, Josh Smith back again. This month we're gonna start talking about my song Brown Gatton.
00:09This tune is from my album Still, which was a jazzier album I did, and the title should tell
00:15you a few things about this tune. It's basically James Brown meets Danny Gatton. That's at least
00:21what I was thinking when I wrote it. So it's at its heart a James Brown shuffle, like, you know.
00:30But mixed with Danny Gatton hybrid picking and ideas, and of course some interesting twists
00:37and turns. So the phrase of the song, the melody, the head of the song, has a two-beat bar every
00:44third bar. So it goes like this. One, two, three.
00:51So, what's happening there is . . . One, two, three, four. . . . One, two. . . . So it's turning itself around with a two-beat bar after every third bar of the melody.
00:58This leads to some cool twists and turns, especially when you go through the change, because then the second time we do it,
01:05we modulate to C. So we go . . . .
01:12. . .
01:19. .
01:33. . . .
01:58So that adds a lot of kind of forward motion to the tune. When we hit those two-beat bars, the audience kind of feels something, because something different than the ordinary is happening.
02:11But it doesn't feel out of place, because it's still in the same time signature. You're just dropping two beats and starting a phrase in a weird spot, as far as what the ear is used to.
02:21And then when we get into the solo later, that makes for really great, cool phrasing things, because you can have licks that cross the bar in a different way than you're used to, and resolve in a weirder spot, and I love that.
02:34And that was kind of the Danny Gatton twist on the James Brown thing. Then we get to the bridge of the song, which goes to the four-chord, and we're full-on James Brown here, where I'm playing straight eighth notes.
02:45So we're basically chromatically moving around the four-chord.
03:05. . . .
03:19With those stabs on the five-chord, and then we're into the solo. So that's the meat and the potatoes of this tune, Brown Gatt.
03:26. . .
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