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Pssssst! D'ya wanna know what makes a Steely Dan Guitar solo? http://www.bennysutton.com/Music/Steely-Dan-Guitar-Solos.aspx

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Steely Dan

My smooth jazz guitar version of the Steely Dan classic. I play all instruments except drums.

Hey! Why not visit http://www.bennysutton.com to hear and download many more great sounds like this?

I've got a page devoted to Steely Dan where I talk about how to play their great guitar solos 
http://www.bennysutton.com/Music/Steely-Dan-Guitar-Solos.aspx


Steely Dan ---- Peg (free download by clicking the 'buy' button)

HEY! Like this? Then why not visit 
http://www.bennysutton.com 
to hear and download many more great sounds like this?

I've got a page devoted to Steely Dan where I talk about how to play their great guitar solos 
http://www.bennysutton.com/Music/Steely-Dan-Guitar-Solos.aspx

'Josie' is another Steely Dan classic off the 1977 album 'Aja'. 

Steely Dan ---- Josie

HEY! check out my website. I have a page devoted to Steely Dan
 http://www.bennysutton.com/Music/Steely-Dan-Guitar-Solos.aspx


Deacon Blues is another classic Steely Dan track off the Aja album.

Guitarists love Steely Dan because they integrated the instrument into their studio productions so beautifully. In the process they gave the world at least 10 of the top 50 guitar solos of all time!

What's the secret of a Steely Dan guitar solo? Find out at http://www.bennysutton.com/Music/Steely-Dan-Guitar-Solos.aspx 

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Steely Dan ---- Deacon Blues

HEY! LIKE THIS? Then why not visit 
www.bennysutton.com 
to hear and download many more great sounds like this?

I've got a page devoted to Steely Dan where I talk about how to play their great guitar solos 
http://www.bennysutton.com/Music/Steely-Dan-Guitar-Solos.aspx


The average Steely Dan Track has forty (very difficult) chord changes in quick succession so Black Friday is the exception that proves the rule! It's basically a blues so I've taken that to its obvious conclusion and done it as a blues guitar version.
The melody line is just two notes so it was challenging, to say the least, without the benefit of a voice. Still, I know ya'all will sing along so here's the words...

When Black Friday comes
I'll stand down by the door
And catch the grey men when they
Dive from the fourteenth floor
When Black Friday comes
I'll collect everything I'm owed
And before my friends find out
I'll be on the road
When Black Friday falls you know it's got to be
Don't let it fall on me
When Black Friday comes
I'll fly down to Muswellbrook
Gonna strike all the big red words
From my little black book
Gonna do just what I please
Gonna wear no socks and shoes
With nothing to do but feed
All the kangaroos
When Black Friday comes I'll be on that hill
You know I will


Steely Dan ---- Black Friday (downloadable)

This is one of the top 10 Steely Dan all time tracks with one of the top 5 guitar all time solos on the original (by Skunk Baxter). My version starts off with the Hammond organ center stage. I recreate the original Skunk Baxter solo note for note but in my own style. Verse two goes acoustic. The second guitar solo is what I would have played if I had been on the session! Originally on the 1973 album Countdown to Ecstacy.

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Steely Dan ---- My Old School (downloadable)

Not strictly a Steely Dan Track this is from Donald Fagen's Nightfly album. However it's as close as he gets to classic Steely tracks. I always thought Fagen wrote it but it is actually a cover they did of a Leiber Stoller song. They know a good song when they see one.
My approach is to jump genres with the beats; there's Dubstep and Disco there! Some horns and a clavinet bassline later and - Voila! The Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. version was originally recorded by The Drifters and was released on a single by Atlantic Records in 1956


Steely Dan ---- Ruby Baby (downloadable)

This is the first of several Steely Dan tracks that I will be releasing in 2016. 
Plenty of melody and emotion to hang your hat on in this tune. I opt for a nice clean 'American' sound to get my Ovation Breadwinner over. Another from the Aja album. 
The Steelys are nothing, if not commercial. "Black Cow" was written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the co-front, core members of the band Steely Dan. It was released as the B-side of the single version of "Josie," which reached #26 on the US Hot 100. Two other singles released from the same album charted even better.
Note the deceptively simple disco-era instrumental starting out with a bass line and drums, then sneaking in layers of complexity with saxophone accompaniment and an electric piano solo. Steely Dan made a name for themselves for having highly polished productions. It was considered nothing special for them to take a year and dozens of session musicians to produce an album of less than ten songs.
Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz sampled the intro for their rap "Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)"
Speaking extra praise for Aja's perfectionism, it won the 1978 Grammy Award for Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording. Not only was Aja certified platinum, it was also one of the first to go platinum.
Theories as to what this song means: Take your pick of a troubled relationship, an ode to self-doubt, a commentary on nightlife, a reference to Hindu culture (cows are sacred), or it could be about Thelonious Monk, the American jazz composer who is often regarded as the father of bebop.
Do you have the multitrack masters for "Black Cow"? If so, Donald Fagen will apparently give you a $600 reward, since their copy went missing. For this reason, remastering the album as a Super Audio CD has been put on hold indefinitely. Sounds cheap to me!


Steely Dan ----- Black Cow

Here I've arranged the horns to take the main role on what is ostensibly a 12 bar blues. The guitar is left to do the improvisation, keeping it slow and bluesey. This is yet another Steely Dan track that is timeless.
on http://www.songfacts.com/ they say
"Chain Lightning is a simple 12 bar blues tune that has a swampy twang to it. This bluesey track has an almost burlesque feel to it and if you close your eyes while listening to it, you can imagine that you are inside of a nineteen fifties vintage strip club with the requisite drummer performing while the strippers are doing their thing.."


Steely Dan ---- Green Earrings (downloadable)

This track, when the Steelies first released it, was marked by its distinctive 'voicebox' guitar, quite an innovation at the time when it was initially released Technology has moved on so much since the original track was recorded. 
The original voice box was a tube attached to your amp the sound from which went up a plastic tube and you mouthed vowels etc with your mouth close to a microphone. I have a pedal with a superb setting that does in digitally! I don't use it often but when I do I love it. So you get a clean guitar solo and a voice box one too for the same money! 
I always wondered why the almost reggae beat - that would mean it was called Jamaican Divorce! Slick move Donald to not do the obvious).
source http://www.songfacts.com
The lyrical meaning of the original refers to the odd practice of going to Haiti for a quickie divorce. You could go to Vegas for a quickie marriage, but what if you want a quickie divorce? In the early '70s, Haiti made it easy, allowing foreigners to divorce with hardly any restriction; the big sell was that only one member of the married party had to be present and request it.
For Haiti, this was a tourism ploy, as travel agents would send Americans looking for a quick and easy divorce to the island, where they would often spend some time on a resort. In many cases, these divorces were requested so that the person could immediately get remarried - a service Haiti also provided. So it was not uncommon for a married man to show up in Haiti with his mistress, get a divorce, and marry the new girl all in the course of a weekend. .Donald Fagan talked about the Haitian divorce in a 1976 interview with Sounds. Said Fagen: "It's a fierce and terrible ritual. I'll tell you that. You wouldn't want your sister to have a Haitian divorce, believe me. It was the quick 'divorce, without too much red tape. If you can say 'incompatibility of character' in French you're as good as gold. But we added a few elements to the ceremony itself."
In this song, it's the woman who goes to Haiti for her divorce. She has some fun while she is there, and presumably hooks up with a local - their sex scene is implied in cinematic terms in the lines:

    Now we dolly back
    Now we fade to black

    When she returns to America, she is pregnant, as Fagen sings, "Some babies grow in a peculiar way."
    The girl in this song drinks a zombie from a coconut shell, which at the time was a very typical island experience. A zombie is a rum-based cocktail that was popular at the time - an alternative to the Pina Colada.


Steely Dan ---- Haitian Divorce

One of the Steelies most melodic tracks that lends itself well to guitar taking the main parts, as well as a solo. Plenty of horns in the middle eight.

Songfacts say about it...
This song seems to be about a betrayed loser lover talking to his eccentric shrink, who perhaps has stolen the guy's girl. It features the signature Steely Dan irony: "All night long, we would sing that stupid song, and every word we sang I knew was true."
As to the identity of Dr. Wu, Steely Dan claims he's a fictional character, with Donald Fagen explaining, "We change the names to protect the innocent."
Becker told Rolling Stone during their 2009 tour: "It's about that uneasy relationship between the patient and doctor. People put faith in doctors, yet they abuse their power and become dangerous."
This title of the album it comes from, Katy Lied, is a line in this song: "Katy lies, you could see it in her eyes."


Steely Dan ---- Doctor Wu (downloadable)

Here I've arranged the horns to take the main role on what is ostensibly a 12 bar blues. The guitar is left to do the improvisation, keeping it slow and bluesey. This is yet another Steely Dan track that is timeless.

on http://www.songfacts.com/ they say
"Chain Lightning is a simple 12 bar blues tune that has a swampy twang to it. This bluesey track has an almost burlesque feel to it and if you close your eyes while listening to it, you can imagine that you are inside of a nineteen fifties vintage strip club with the requisite drummer performing while the strippers are doing their thing.."


Steely Dan ---- Chain Lightning (downloadable)

Well I've covered practically the whole album already so why not do the title track!
Steely Dan Trivia... the name Aja was pretty random according to Becker and Fagen, it was a wife of a friend.


Steely Dan ---- Aja (downloadable)

This is from Donald Fagen's Nightfly album. It's as close as he gets to classic Steely tracks like Doctor Wu.
I give it bit of a modern pop flavour with the sampled, repetitive vocal pattern There's loads of melody I could pick out on the guitar too, I'm pleased with the solo which is typically Dan-esque. You gotta dig their effortless key changes.
 It was the first track of his debut solo album The Nightfly, and was released in September 1982 as its first single, charting on the Billboard Hot 100, Mainstream Rock, R&B Singles and Adult Contemporary charts.
The "I.G.Y." of the title refers to the "International Geophysical Year", an event that ran from July 1957 to December 1958 which was an international scientific project promoting collaboration among the world's scientists. Fagen's lyrics reference, from the point of view of that time, an optimistic vision of futuristic concepts such as solar-powered cities, a transatlantic tunnel, permanent space stations, and spandex jackets.


Steely Dan ---- I.G.Y. (downloadable)

HAL is a great little groove. Very typical Steely Dan chord progressions. I manage to play a lot of the melody on guitar during this track. Some Steely tracks melodies can be limited to a couple of notes for the vocals (e.g. Black Friday). This one has a beautiful melody, complete with those odd little passing notes and key changes we know and love (Becker/Fagen for).
I'm very pleased with the solo on this one. You can't beat the Steelies to improvise over. It's tough to play with such a clean sound and guitar tone but this you can get #in the pocket' of. It's bluesey, it's jazzy, and, as you know, I'm sparing with the number of notes I play per musical bar. I'm out to be the most expressive I can be - and that means making the most you can of the notes  you've got (and the silences between them).
At over five minutes this is one of the longest Steely track I have done!
Steely Dan Trivia... Apparently, this song is based lyrically on the epic novel The Odyssey by Homer. The hero, Ulysses, is trying to get home across the ocean after the Trojan War, but the gods keep making it difficult:
It's off the Aja album


Steely Dan ---- Home At Last

I've really given this on a pop dance treatment. There's Electro and Disco going on in different places. Otherwise it's business as usual, the lead guitar picking out the melody and a solo later on (at 1 min 50)
Steely Dan Trivia... Bad Sneakers  was released as the second track on the Steelies 1975 album Katy Lied. Apparently producer Gary Katz later regretted not releasing the song as the first single.


Steely Dan ----- Bad Sneakers (downloadable)

This is a song that was specifically written to order to be the title theme to the 1978 film FM. It made the US Top Forty that year when released as a single. It had been recorded during the same sessions as Aja and employed some of the same studio musicians and recording personnel, in addition to band members and songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Among them were saxophonist Pete Christlieb and drummer Jeff Porcaro; several members of the Eagles sang backing vocals. It only appears on compilation albums.
Steely Dan Trivia... The Steelies had a thing going with the Eagles - the lyrics to one of their tracks "Everything You Did", a lyric says, "turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening." ". In response he Eagles penned the lyrics, "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" in their hit "Hotel California" 


Steely Dan ---- FM (downloadable)

On this one I start off on guitar with playing octaves on the melody, a typical jazz technique. I then get naughty and change the guitar sound to a shredding, highly flanged sound for the rest of the track. This is another track off the 1975 Katy Lied album.

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Everyone's Gone To The Movies -- Steely Dan

This is typical Steely Dan territory, even though it was on Donald Fagen's Nighfly album (which I contend is the best album Steely Dan never released!). I use my American Clean tone on guitar for the melody, it's quite a complex piece but very satisfying whenever, in typical Steely Dan style, it changes key momentarily like modal jazz. It's short, but sweet!

Donald Fagan --- Walk Between the Raindrops (downloadable)

Guitar fans... I recreate, rather successfully I think, the original iconic Larry Carlton guitar solo on the intro note for note. The track wouldn't have been the same! I'm an advocate of stamping your own style on covers so I then do my own thing.
"Don't Take Me Alive" is the third track from the fifth Steely Dan album the Royal Scam. Written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of course. Leaving no mystery to the lyrics, "Don't Take Me Alive" is about a violent criminal holed up with "a case of dynamite" telling the cops to shoot him
Steely Dan Trivia... Do you have the multi-track masters for "Black Cow"? If so, Donald Fagen will give you a $600 reward, since their copy went missing. For this reason, re-mastering the album as a Super Audio CD has been put on hold indefinitely.


Steely Dan ---- Don't Take Me Alive

This track features THAT guitar solo. It is rated by many as one of the top ten guitar solos of all time. The original guitarist on the record, Larry Carlton, pulled a real classic out of the bag and I kept putting off doing this track because I knew I had to recreate it note for note. It is such an integral part of the track I couldn't possibly just do my own solo,  I had to do my version of it. I did it pretty much note for note but, I hope, in my own inimitable style. What makes it so good? It's a text book case of good taste and technique on a par with Mozart. The musical theory is impeccable, Larry constructed it using impressive arpeggios of the many complex chords. He runs up and down scales thinking out of the box by inserting ridiculously chosen passing notes that just shouldn't work. It's mostly perfectly fluent 16th notes jumping up and down the fretboard, peppered with trademark Larry phrases. The structure is perfect. A great guitar solo needs a dramatic entry, which it has, it totally hits the ground running. It then proceeds at breakneck pace in the most tuneful of melodies right until the end, which could have ended in two places and still made sense. Man, there are a lot of notes in it and it's very hard to play even though I'm stylistically inclined toward Larry Carlton as you all may know! It took me six hours to master when I usually complete a whole track in the same time! Consider then that Larry did it in two takes! That's why he's the best guitarist in the World.   

Kid Charlemagne ---- Steely Dan (downloadable)

Check out my Soundcloud channel for my latest music releases. 
Love Guitar? You're in the right place!
I'm different! I play melodies - even when improvising!  
I'm really not interested in impressing other musicians. I'm creating music for everyone.
I'M ALSO HERE...
http://www.bennysutton.com
MY VIDEOS http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5TJp0GyhYOnusiCGB8z4fG0T8G35gTTi
https://soundcloud.com/bennysutton_covers


ABOUT ME
I play the music I like to listen to. 
As a guitarist I like to think I have my own style.
Harmony, and the groove is what I'm chasing, hopefully with a tasteful, nuanced, and distinctive presentation. 
I don't have a genre as such. I could sort of call myself a smooth Jazz 'n' Blues guitar 'thang' but in reality every track crosses over multiple strands of R&B/Jazz/Funk/Pop. Don't be put off by my use of the "J" word. Jazz to me is anything unpredictable and I'm nothing if not contemporary. 
Rhythm playing is as much a part of my "game" as lead soloing. I love the Funk!
My main instrument is guitar. I play a 1973 Ovation Breadwinner, an Ibanez nylon stringed and a Yamaha keyboard loaded with Keyscape. Unless stated I play all the other instruments too (mostly Bass), and sequence MIDI and arrange/produce. 

MY JOURNEY
I was signed with Fresh Air records and EMI in the 1980's creating Jazz/funk dance tracks but things were just as challenging then as they are now for musicians so I got a 'proper job' for 20 years! During all that time my guitar was in the loft! I rediscovered music in 2010 and Soundcloud in 2014.


MY SOUNDCLOUD
I am grateful to Soundcloud listeners who take the time to press |>Play - and especially if you give me some feedback :-)
I hope what you hear will draw you in sufficiently to explore on my own website. Nearly all my original stuff (6 albums worth) are on www.BennySutton.com and all are downloadable.
Please don't follow me in hope of getting to get an automatic follow back. I don't do that because I only follow the smallest number of people I can keep track of. I'll have a look at your page but will only follow back if you are really of interest to me. See my follow list, you'll discover some very talented artistes, many of whom I have been lucky to Collab. Soundcloud really is the place to find the real innovators these days - not the music industry approved channels, especially MTV!
If you want to get my attention, send me a PM.

Steely Dan

Benny Sutton