NTK - POLL !!!

[bloke]

In your opinion, did Archie Bell and the Drells actually play "Tighten Up" in F sharp, or do you think they sped up the recording (because the song was way over 3 minutes) in order to get it down to 3 minutes and 16 seconds, and perhaps they actually played it in E or F...?

(His vocals sound a little odd to me, and even the background hooting and hollering noises sound a bit odd as well. Further, it hit the charts when he was in basic training, and - reportedly - no one in his platoon believed it was him. I wonder if it was because his voice sounded different on the sped up song.)

I can play the bass line (bass guitar) in F sharp, but it's so much easier in F, and it's incredibly easy in E.

[1 Ton Tommy]

I'm betting on E. The trumpet parts are a no brainer even in their F#. I don't think Archie could sing that higher than E. They didn't have auto tune in those days either. So they'd have to speed up or slow down the tape to change pitch. As bloke said maybe they sped it up to make time and that shifted it up a whole step.

[bloke]

I'm thinking it was actually played in E as well, and was sped up to sound in F sharp.

[peteedwards]

Live version is in F#:




not that the studio version wasn't sped up, but his voice doesn't sound different live, and this was clearly not sped up.

[bloke]

Damn good point @peteedwards

Thanks for that.

I'm going to go back and work on it in F sharp, and figure out if there's any fingering shortcuts that I'm overlooking.

I seriously doubt that the guy pulled his strings up on his bass.

No... This is never a tune that is ever played on any cover band gigs, but I would just like to wig It out for the sake of doing so.

Fingering wise, the low pitch anchor sort of defines the fingering.

It still seems to me that it could either have been pulled up strings or a capo. I should watch that live video and see if there's a capo, but I bet there isn't. I wonder if it zooms in on the player enough to see what he's doing with his hands.

EDIT:
OK. It's actually pretty easy in F sharp, but it's only particularly easy if either the player has huge hands or they're playing a short neck bass. I have very large hands and long fingers, but not what I would call a "huge". I can play the repeated lick on the wide frets, but three and a half minutes of it (other than the drum solo) is a lot of repetition.

[arpthark]

It's kind of hard to tell with the video quality, but I think I am seeing capos.

[bloke]

It's kind of hard to tell with the video quality, but I think I am seeing capos.

It's super easy in the open key, that's for sure.
Thanks for spotting that, if indeed you spotted it.

The repeated major 7th chords - F sharp to B - over and over again is actually not all that monotonous to the ear with all of the chatter and the showmanship involved in this dance number. This was 1968, and I wonder if putting those major seventh earworms into people's ears in 1968 was part of what led to the popularity of major 7th chords in the 1970s, certainly with the 1970 Chicago ballad "Color My World". (??)

...but if there is capo use, I suppose we need to determine whether the capos are lacquered or silver plated.

bloke "I played in a garage band in the 5th and 6th grade, and a 16-year-old older brother of the drummer (who played guitar) came in and taught us 'Tighten Up'." I didn't own a bass, but the same family (regarding the older guitar player and the younger drummer) had a party room converted - YUP! - from a garage, and they had a lot of instruments out there. I used an off-brand short neck Japanese bass that was back there. They may have bought it at Zayre department store - or some such a place... I'm sure we played that tune in E. ... and I don't expect anyone here to remember or know anything about Zayre department stores of the 1960s and 1970s."

post script:
Both the older and younger brothers were the definition of late 60s "cool". They both wore the right clothes, talked the right way, walked the right walk, and all that stuff... bloke...LOL...not so much.

[peteedwards]

Looks like a short neck bass for sure
1st note you can clearly see his finger on the 2nd fret- F#

[1 Ton Tommy]

Watching their fingerings, looks to me that closeup of the trumpets shows them playing in G# - or F# concert.

Being raised in a conservative, religious household and brought up on top-40 radio, at the time I thought the lyrics bordered on obscene. And The Dell's costumes weren't what was happenin' on the West Coast. Then it was bell-bottom jeans with embroidered patches, peasant blouses, chambray work shirts and sandals; except for me it was OD fatigues and combat boots. The Jefferson Airplane had "hit their stride" with Grace Slick belting out White Rabbit. The Grateful Dead was on rapid-radio-rotation with Truckin' and the Beach Boys had a major hit with California Girls, Sigh...

When I got to NYC in summer 68 it was James Brown blasting out of every window in Harlem, not a Beach Boy was seen or heard. Soul music was king, WOR and WABC played it all day and all night. Archie Bell was right in there too. I thought I'd landed on another planet.

There was still a folk scene in The Village but it was on it's way out. A nickle bag bought in the back of the used book store on payday was my date's intro to a folk club with tiny tables topped with a candle in a chianti bottle and a pretty girl who looked remarkably like Emmy Lou Harris waiting tables and playing a black guitar between sets.

Need I say that when I got back to The City in Dec. '69 after my jungle field trip, Woodstock had happened and the scene had radically changed. So had the music with lots more 7th and minor chords. You can hear that creeping up in the late 60 in West Coast music, particularly the San Francisco bands. I think Woodstock had a major influence on the chord structure of pop music. And AFRVN's steady diet of American Rock 'n Roll and soul introduced that to many backwoods boys who, believe it or not, hadn't heard much before. Viet Nam had a great homogenizing effect. I didn't know Bluegrass from Country till then.

[prairieboy1]

Watching their fingerings, looks to me that closeup of the trumpets shows them playing in G# - or F# concert.

Being raised in a conservative, religious household and brought up on top-40 radio, at the time I thought the lyrics bordered on obscene. And The Dell's costumes weren't what was happenin' on the West Coast. Then it was bell-bottom jeans with embroidered patches, peasant blouses, chambray work shirts and sandals; except for me it was OD fatigues and combat boots. The Jefferson Airplane had "hit their stride" with Grace Slick belting out White Rabbit. The Grateful Dead was on rapid-radio-rotation with Truckin' and the Beach Boys had a major hit with California Girls, Sigh...

When I got to NYC in summer 68 it was James Brown blasting out of every window in Harlem, not a Beach Boy was seen or heard. Soul music was king, WOR and WABC played it all day and all night. Archie Bell was right in there too. I thought I'd landed on another planet.

There was still a folk scene in The Village but it was on it's way out. A nickle bag bought in the back of the used book store on payday was my date's intro to a folk club with tiny tables topped with a candle in a chianti bottle and a pretty girl who looked remarkably like Emmy Lou Harris waiting tables and playing a black guitar between sets.

Need I say that when I got back to The City in Dec. '69 after my jungle field trip, Woodstock had happened and the scene had radically changed. So had the music with lots more 7th and minor chords. You can hear that creeping up in the late 60 in West Coast music, particularly the San Francisco bands. I think Woodstock had a major influence on the chord structure of pop music. And AFRVN's steady diet of American Rock 'n Roll and soul introduced that to many backwoods boys who, believe it or not, hadn't heard much before. Viet Nam had a great homogenizing effect. I didn't know Bluegrass from Country till then.

Thank you for your very informative post!

[bloke]

Looks like a short neck bass for sure
1st note you can clearly see his finger on the 2nd fret- F#

It actually sounds like a short neck bass on the recording.
I'm going to have to fire up my laptop and watch it. I'm sure I can find it if you folks found it.
I can't see crap on my phone screen. ..
Again, I can tell that on a guitar scale bass, I could easily play it in F sharp with or without a capo...
It's just a big ass reach on a full scale bass guitar.

With a capo, I could play that lick (and it's minor variants) all night... LOL not that I'd want to.

[bloke]

By the way folks,

Thanks for being willing to discuss this off the wall topic.

[arpthark]

The video is so blurry for me, what I thought was an old-school capo could definitely just be part of the nut.

[bloke]

The video is so blurry for me, what I thought was an old-school capo could definitely just be part of the nut.

My $40 Japanese bass - that I bought from a pawn shop on Beale Street new in a cardboard box in 1973 (at that time, the equivalent of cheap Chinese) was stolen at a high school big band jazz festival at Memphis State University. I told my band director I wasn't buying another bass - at least not to use at school, and my amp was sort of trashing out too... so he went to the board of education warehouse and they had a beautiful new white Fender Mustang short neck bass and a Fender Bassman II amp to go with it.

At that time, those basses came with funny little rubber mutes to dampen the ring of the strings... It was four little pieces of rubber down on the tailpiece mounted on a piece of metal.
I'm sure almost everyone took those off and set them aside, as I did. I absolutely loved that little bass, and that was a pretty good amp too.

Since I was playing so much nylon string guitar at that time, that bass didn't feel much different other than the size of the strings...
With a not particularly good analogy to a spinet piano - but sort of one that works, that bass didn't sound wonderful much beyond the 7th fret, but otherwise it was okay. Everything's a compromise, isn't it?