Analysis

There is a story about how Get On was created: Hurriganes recorded their second album Roadrunner in Stockholm. At the end of the last recording session the band noticed that they still needed one more piece to fill up the LP. Remu Aaltonen, the drummer/singer/leader of the band asked Järvinen to play the intro of Johnny B. Goode, Aaltonen and the bass player Cisse Häkkinen would join the piece and Aaltonen would improvise the words. The result was a fine crystallization of the history of rock'n roll, all elements in a perfect balance and the piece full of wild spirit.

The analyse process was relatively simple in this case. Get On is based on a 12-bar blues pattern, the chord base consisting of the three main functions: I, IV and V. The 12'th bar differ from the other dominant function bars. It has a clear ending character, therefore I named it V1. In the 10'th bar the dominant stays from the previous bar instead of going to the subdominant as usual -just like in Johnny B. Goode.

The context-free grammar consists of hierarchical levels. Each level is divided into smaller units. For the highest level, I chose a 12-bar pattern, which I then divided into three 4-bar parts named A, B, C. These three parts were each divided into four separate bars according to the degree of chords:

12-bar pattern -> A B C

A -> I I I I
B -> IV IV I I
C -> V V I V1

Each bar consists of terminal symbols. A terminal is a MIDI-coded note-number (C1 = 60, C#1 = 61 etc.) followed by a colon-separated duration value (1 is a quarter note, 0.5 an eight etc.). Click here to see the grammar.

I used the two solo sections and the ten different guitar licks from the chorus repetition in the end as a corpus. I left out the upbeat in the first solo section. Each note was transformed into a terminal symbol. I consider not to transform note expressions like bends or slurs into the MIDI-code system, so you will not hear any in the computer generated solos.

Get On: Music and Transcriptions