God Rest Ye Jazzy Gentlemen [Music]

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Enjoy this classic holiday tune, spiffed up in the creative style of funky jazz. The song is a classic, but the arrangement this time is completely original, of my own making.

Title: God Rest Ye Jazzy Gentlemen
Artist: @creativetruth
Year: 2018

This song was fully engineered using the Kork Gadget on the Nintendo Switch.

Even though I was going for a slow swing so it could be danced to a Foxtrot beat, swing is an extremely challenging feel to program into electronically digitized songs. In sheet music, composers often state that two eight notes tied together should be counted instead more like a three beat triplet, with the longer first beat holding two beats, and the third beat being shorter with only one beat. In performance, some people never quite learn how to relax and slip into the groove. It has to move through you at a steady rate.

In this arrangements, the notes are perfectly quantized to perfectly even beat values. It makes the swing feel a lot more like funk to me, but I'm still happy with the results. Definitely something you can still chill out and enjoy.

This song was composed using several tracks: trumpet (melody1), tenor sax (melody2), tenor sax (bass1), electric bass (bass2), steel drum (treble1 rhythms), clarinet (treble2 descant solo) and various percussion (kick, stick, hi-hat, cymbals).

Listen to the traditional song in the video below, with the repetitive marching beat commonly associated with it, and compare it to the version I made for #dsound.

And here is an example of jazz swing incorporated into the same song. I can't make songs this complex using Korg, or with live, richly flowing instruments obviously.

Please enjoy and share.

#song #jazz #saxophone #god-rest-ye-merry-gentlemen #korg

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