Comparative Analysis
We chose to create a cover arrangement of "Under Pressure" by David Bowie and Queen as it was the only song we could all agree on. We chose to feature our arrangement around the concepts of structure, texture, tone colour and dynamics, along the way, we changed the pitch for parts of the song as it was too hard for our vocalist to sing. We decided to feature our arrangement around these concepts as we felt it would be nice to have a shorter and more acoustic version of the song. We also explored duration. Our arrangement has unintentionally changed all the concepts in order to make it easier for us to perform.
Original
Our Cover
Duration
The original "Under Pressure" was played at a tempo of 120bpm, although we tried to match their tempo, we started out slightly slower, and had many fluctuations in our cover. It is played at 4/4/ and is syncopated. The ostinato/riff is kept the same. Overall, duration is the main concept of music that we haven't changed
Pitch
Freddie Mercury and David Bowie were both male vocalists, but our vocalist was a female, which made the singing pitch higher. We have copied the main melody exactly and the key it is in, D major. The guitars and keyboard all played chords, and sometimes in both songs there was dissonance. There was quite a narrow range for our cover because our vocalist had difficulty going too high or too low, but the original had a wider range.
Texture
For both versions of the song, it starts monophonic with just the bass starting to play the riff in time with the drums. Then it becomes homophonic, for the original, the guitars (electric) slowly build up, and gradually becomes thicker, whereas for our cover, we all come in at the same time making it quite thick from the beginning. The original varies in texture quite often, becoming thinner in the bridges and verse 4, but on the other hand, ours is the same thickness the whole way through, apart from when Frankie drops out. In the original, there is only one bassists that switches from the riff to chordal bass, the main difference from ours is that the riff stops halfway through verse one whereas ours stops after verse 2, but this wasn't a problem as our texture was already thick because we had a keyboard, 2 electric guitarists and 2 bassists, which meant one could play the riff and the other could go chordal.
Tone Colour
The original used two vocalists, a piano, organ, electric guitar, drums, bass guitar, synths and body percussion, for our cover, we had one vocalist, two bassists, two electric guitars, and one keyboard. The tone colour for the original was quite deep, sweet in the verses and is quite eerie and futuristic in the bridges and scatting parts. In some places, it is even jazzy. Whereas for our cover, it has used more synthesised instruments making it sound more electronic, however it still sounds deep, but lacks the jazz element.
Dynamics and Expressive Techniques
In the original version, there are many gradual changes in volume, however for our cover, there are almost no changes in dynamics, with the only difference in volume being the intro and outro. Whereas the original has many examples of scatting and falsettos, our vocalist found it difficult, thus, we cut it out.
Structure
The original song had a structure of:
Intro
Verse 1
Bridge
Verse 2
Bridge
Verse 3
Verse 4
Verse 5
Verse 6
Verse 7
Fade out
And our cover had a structure of
Intro - riff x4 and DAGA
Verse 1
Bridge - instrumental
Verse 2
Verse 3
Verse 4 - stopping before "turned away from it all..."
DAGA - instrumental
Verse 7
riff x2/outro
ending
We decided to change all the bridges to instrumental sections as Frankie had difficulty singing it. We cut out verses 5 and 6 as they were too high for Frankie to sing and we were unable to keep in time. We removed then end bit of verse 4 as it was different to the rest of the song and we all had difficulty keeping in time. We added 4 bars before verse 7 to make the transition from verse 4 smoother, as we wanted to keep it short and smooth. Then for the outro, Lachlan played the riff twice more in silence, then we all came in, a quarter note on an A chord and a quarter note on a D chord, with Frankie singing "under pressure".
