Direct Flyte is a track from my 2022 album, Power Station, and features the great Victor Wooten on bass. The song has morphed a little bit in subsequent live performances, as we’ve tightened up the arrangement and gotten very specific about the individual parts.
What I’d like to talk about today is how the syncopations of the tune’s primary guitar part work in conjunction with the chordal accents supplied by the keyboard, which I think is a good example of effective ensemble arranging.
When you hear how the two instruments work in tandem, you’ll get a good idea of how I like to approach coordinating various musical elements like an orchestral arranger.
The form of the tune is “AABA.” The three “A” sections are in A minor, and the “B” section modulates up a minor 3rd to C minor. The rhythm guitar part I play during these sections is a four-bar phrase that’s fairly simple.
Following the AABA form, there’s a single-note ensemble (band) section, shown here in Figure 1.
In bar 1, a pattern based on the A minor pentatonic scale (A, C, D, E, G) descends across the bottom three strings in straight 16th notes, followed in bar 2 by octave shapes for F# and G. Notice that I palm mute the entire phrase.
My inspiration for this tune was Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, but through a funky lens, as if Tower of Power had written and recorded the melody.
As you listen to Direct Flyte, you’ll hear that the guitar part lands in one place and the keyboard part lands in another. We’re very intentional about that because, when you have a 10-piece band, there’s a high potential for individual parts to step on each other. Communication and arrangement is key to making sure all of the parts are precise, serve a purpose and do not get in each other’s way.
Figure 2 illustrates the primary guitar part: I begin on the A root note and then play C and E together by barring the G and B strings. My strumming hand is moving in continuous 16th notes, so that each single note, dyad or muted-string accent will occur at precisely the right place in the “grid.”
In the spaces left by the rhythm guitar, the keyboard adds chord “stabs.” Figure 3 shows the keyboard part. It begins with a heavy accent on Am7 on beat 1 of the first bar. In bar 2, Am accents are played twice during beat 3. Bar 3 is identical to bar 1, and bar 4 is silence.
The initial keyboard accent adds a lot of power to the downbeat, and the subsequent hits effectively fill the space left by the rhythm guitar. If we pan the instruments left and right, it feels like a musical conversation.
Figure 4 puts the entire arrangement together. In bar 9, after eight bars on Am, we move up to Cm, and in bar 12 a chromatically descending line is played as a band figure to modulate back down to Am, where the four-bar “A” phrase is repeated. This is followed by the single-note descending figure from in Figure 1.
The takeaway here is how every element integrates into a very specific Minneapolis/Prince-style rhythm, with all of the instruments coming together on the chromatically descending line shown in bar 10 of Figure 4.
In my arrangements, I use the mindset of an orchestral arranger for the instruments to play off of one another in a “call and response” manner and then to coalesce into a big, powerful unison part.
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
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