Pepsiman's Theme Song SHREDS

[Music] pepsi man is a superhero created by pepsi's japanese corporate branch as their brand mascot in the mid 90s with a sworn duty to deliver pepsi to those in need the pepsi man video game also created in japan in the 90s called players to take on the role of pepsi man and race through city streets to deliver pepsi wherever one is thirsty i'm telling you all of this because the pepsi man theme song contains some of the most killing sacks and trumpet solos i've ever heard in a video game soundtrack now i'm more of a coke guy myself but trust me these solos are tasty after listening through it i realized that we may have just as much to learn about music from these solos as we do about heroism from this shiny faceless chevalier there's something about a great solo that feels almost conversational listening to a great soloist play it's almost like the notes all kind of disappear and the ideas just speak straight into your brain kind of like how you never think about the individual words or letters that somebody is using when telling you something they all just blend together into the idea that they're trying to communicate there's definitely something magical about this phenomenon to me something that seems resistant to analysis but in spite of that i think a lot of it has to do with structuring each melodic line in the solo to create little melodic resolutions as it goes the need for well-built lines becomes hyper-apparent when soloing over just one chord when soloing over a chord progression there's a sequence of voice leading and tension and release built into the movement of the chords themselves so just finding ways to outline each chord as it passes by will probably give your solo the sense that it has something to say soloing over just one chord gives you no such easy out and it's entirely up to the soloist to create lines that speak to the listener while creating drama and intrigue without any help from the harmony since the pepsi man theme is entirely made up of a repeating 1 bar a minor riff both the sax and trumpet solos have the opportunity to show off some great examples of the kind of melodic conversational lines i've been talking about so today i'm going to break down three different approaches for creating great lines in your solo in order of increasing complexity so without further ado let's go in melody writing all notes are not created equal and improvised melodies are no different each note in a key behaves slightly differently some have directions that they want to pull towards and some want to stay right where they are and this allows melodies to create little cycles of tension and resolution that are inherently satisfying with just one simple line that's why just giving aspiring improvisers a scale to work with doesn't always yield great results it's how you arrange the notes in that scale that make a melodic line great improvised or not to demonstrate what i mean let's look at the first eight bars of pepsi man's sac solo he kicks things off in a super high range matching the intensity of the band and the people yelling at the top of their lungs but he also starts with these really short simple phrases that give him tons of room to grow as the solo goes on immediately you can tell this guy really knows what he's doing these first eight bars consist of three distinct phrases each building up on the same melodic material the first chunk runs up an a minor pentatonic scale fragment moving from g to a and resolving up to c this is then answered with a diatonic enclosure of our tonic a a diatonic enclosure being when you surround a targeted note with the notes from the scale on either side of it like so [Applause] this is a well-crafted melodic statement we get the balance of a three-note upward moving call and three-note downward moving response both giving satisfying melodic resolutions to a minor chord tones both the pentatonic five six to one or flat seven one to flat three movement and diatonic enclosure are well established pieces of melodic vocabulary that are very useful the sax player doesn't let this great idea go to waste either the following phrase takes the same melodic idea and morphs it into a more rhythmically complex form this time he dips down to the g right after the resolution to the tonic which sets up the third phrase yet another elaboration of the initial melodic idea this time extended into this arpeggio down and e minor triad the final b and g notes of the arpeggio double as another diatonic enclosure of our tonic a which leaps up into this line walking down to yet another diatonic enclosure of our tonic a which finally ends the phrase by jumping down to a low d and bouncing right back up to an e to resolve the phrase on an a minor chord tone notice how every single bar in the phrase is linked together with a diatonic enclosure of the tonic and how what fills in each of these resolutions is centered around non-chord tones that take us away from the key of the piece [Music] this slight tension the slight push and pull from and back to an a minor sound combined with the excellent development of the great initial melodic idea is part of what gives the solo that magic conversational quality i mentioned earlier a variation of the diatonic enclosure that we've seen so much of already is the diatonic above semitone below enclosure as you may be able to guess from the name all this means is that the lower note of the enclosure is raised to be a semitone below the targeted note regardless of whether that note belongs in the key or not we see this used frequently by the trumpet player later on in the tune we get four bar traded solos between the sax and the trumpet and one of these four bar phrases shows the trumpet employing the raised g-sharp to supercharge each resolution to the tonic a note these kinds of diatonic above chromatic below enclosures are a simple little tool but they bring such a great shape to the lines and lend a much more sophisticated sound to what would otherwise be entirely a collection of a minor and a minor pentatonic scale movement another way to build interesting lines is to imply alternate harmonies on top of the original chord progression now when we break the notes in a scale down into these two basic groups of chord tones and non-chord tones you'll notice that the non-chord tones can form a totally separate chord of their own in the key of a minor for example the non-chord tones or upper extensions however you want to think of them stack up in thirds to make a g7 chord if you were to base the extensions off of the a dorian mode with the raised sixth f sharp taking the place of f natural a very common occurrence in jazz improvisation you'd find that the non-chord tones of the key build a g major 7 chord we see this chord used in the beginning of the trading section when the sax player creates this line [Music] a diatonic above chromatic below enclosure of our tonic a leads to a downward arpeggio of a g major 7 chord that leaps back up to an e this is actually kind of a standard piece of jazz vocabulary but not necessarily imposed over an a minor chord then we get a long diatonic enclosure of our third c which quickly resolves down to our tonic a [Music] it's basically the same structure as we saw at the very beginning of the solo establishing the tonic emphasizing non-chord tones then returning to the tonic but done by superimposing another harmony on top of the original this kind of super imposition doesn't have to end so quickly however the idea of implying a g major sound over top of an a minor chord or the sound of a flat seven chord over top of a tonic minor chord was famously used to great effect by a cool cat named miles davis ever heard of him on a recording called so what from the album kind of blue you ever heard of it here miles plays a c major triad over top of the extended d minor 7 chord underneath [Music] in the only slightly less acclaimed pepsi man theme the trumpet player weaves this exact same sound into different parts of his solo here these very rhythmically loose a minor scale runs break into a super laid back arpeggio down a g major triad [Music] while you'd be hard-pressed to find a jazz trumpeter who isn't influenced by miles in some way the influence here is unmistakable in a less straightforward iteration of the same idea we see the trumpet repeatedly run up a g pentatonic scale with triplets in this super cool five note grouping the pentatonic scale is only slightly less obvious than a straight-up triad when it comes to establishing the sound of a chord so this evokes the same g major over a minor sound we heard before the added rhythmic complexity here gives some extra oomph that makes the eventual resolution back to a minor with this walk up to c and subsequent walk down to a feel all the more satisfying it's not a difficult figure just a pentatonic scale played at medium tempo but the rhythm and harmonic context make it sound masterful [Music] there are tons more examples of this g over a minor sound used throughout these solos especially the trumpet solo but superimposing alternate harmonies on top of the original chords or chord in this case doesn't always have to use notes from the home key that's right it's time to talk about playing outside the changes [Music] now this is where all the hep cats play all playing outside the changes really means is that you play notes from outside the key in your solo usually by implying a harmony that is very distant from the original harmony of the tune you're playing there are a bunch of different ways to do this but the important part to remember is the smooth transition from playing in the key to out of the key and back a hip resolution back into the key can make the difference between sounding like the slickest solo you've ever heard and sounding like someone who doesn't know the first thing about improvising the sac solo features a lot of great outside moments like this a perfect example comes when this run down the a minor scale seamlessly transitions into a classic minor chord lick walking up the minor scale one two three four five and then back down five three two one only here he's playing this lick in the key of e flat minor moving to the tonality a tritone away from the tonic is about as far away as you can go and it sounds crunchy as hell but it's ended off with a seamless resolution back to our home key of a minor by having the two to one resolution of the e flat minor lick double as a chromatic enclosure of the following e the fifth in our original key i see your stank face you can't hide it from me playing out like this can be a great way to raise the intensity of a solo moving toward a climax right before the peak of the sac solo this building 16th note line moves through a couple of different harmonies from this accented tonic a we move up a b diminished arpeggio to an f from which we descend chromatically into a rising a flat major arpeggio this descends chromatically again to an a before immediately running down and back up an e major triad arpeggio before moving into a flurry of chromatic notes that bring us down to an e from here we walk up an e minor pentatonic scale before sailing up to a climactic high c resolving back to an a minor tonality right as the epic pepsi man yell comes back in [Music] okay let's slow that down and listen to it again there is so much harmonic information packed in here and we move through it with these chromatic transitions so quickly that it's incredibly disorienting but that's exactly what the soloist was going for this flurry of blows leaves us defenseless for the final knockout punch that gets delivered right in our face to the tune of pepsi man now that is how you end a solo there are of course lots of things that make a solo great that take it past the edge of being a collection of notes to really speaking to the listener the soloist's rhythm phrasing tone development of musical ideas there's no one thing you can point to to say this solo rocks because of this that said i think taking a moment to appreciate how these soloists structured their lines can give us insight into one aspect of great improvising and then maybe we can take another moment to appreciate how the hell did pepsi man get such killer players to rip on his theme song what are you serious you didn't have to go so hard for a pepsi superhero ad campaign if you'd like to be the one running through crowded city streets to deliver me a pepsi or a pepsi equivalent amount of money you could instead think about donating to my patreon page here big thanks to patron red hollow for bringing this amazing theme to my attention and thanks to all of you for watching happy valentine's day and i'll see you guys in the next [Applause] [Music] one bye

Channel: 8-bit Music Theory

Views: 279,237

Rating: 4.9765034 out of 5

Keywords: jazz solos, how to play jazz, sax solo analysis, pepsiman, pepsiman theme song, playing outside the changes, jazz improvisation, learn to improvise, how to solo, video game music, 8-bit Music Theory

Id: ikMwQxaSRjU

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021