Theyve certainly aged better since many techniques are still used today, and no pun intended, these films pioneered and created revolutionary techniques due to their low budget
or scary rhythms. The sheet music for some of the trumpet lines in the Dollars Trilogy is downright brutal. semiquaver triplets starting on offbeats? yep. semiquaver septuplets? yep
Even when hes purposely playing out of key i.e. some of the harmonica parts in once upon a time in the west he just makes it work. Heck even when hes not using instruments he can make an establishing sound, like the use of the natural acoustics in the opening of once upon a time in the west
Ennio Morricone is Innovative for his Time, totally different from the Old West Songs of the 50s: he mixed touches of Rock, Jazz, Mexican Music, Classical Music and additional sounds with Exotic Instruments and Specific Objects, in addition to the already Traditional and Striking Whistles. This man created a New Musical Genre that was later vastly imitated and influenced dozens of Composers in the Future. King of Western Music.
My dad is a classic western nut so I grew up watching these films. I ended up becoming an orchestra violist and have always recalled this style of music that initially inspired an interest in music. Thank you for digging deep here. You really struck a nostalgic vein with me and learning about this was deeply meaningful. Again, thank you.
The surf rock explanation is arguably the best part here! Amazing how two incredibly iconic styles of music share such similuar roots... all delineated by the swing and beat.
The really funny connection is that when Tarantino started making movies which drew in parts upon the spaghetti western, he chose Miserlou, a famous surf hit, to be in Pulp Fiction because it reminded him of the music of spaghetti westerns... when really the music of Morricone was inspired by music like Dick Dale's.
De Rosa: _The melody whistled by Alessandroni is being repeated by the electric guitar of D'Amario: another very characteristic timbre, which some people associated with the sound of The Shadows._ Morricone: I haven't heard of that band back then. I started to utilize the electric guitar in my arrangements and then in a documentary film by Paolo Cavara: I Malamondo ('64) ... When A Fistful of Dollars came out, many people declared it an invention, but the truth is, that I had employed the electric guitar already for years, but not as a solo instrument. Its tough and cutting timbre seemed perfect for the atmosphere of the film. Makeshift translation from Morricone's autobiography "Inseguendo quel suono". Highly recommended, if you're into his music.
I would love to see a discussion about the influence of the mission impossible theme in pop-culture's idea of spy movies. Since they used 5/4 as opposed to any common sense in filmmaking, that rhythm turned out to be incredibly memorable. Because mainstream music never reaches beyond common time or 3/4, just the time signature alone quickly became a staple of that spy vibe in pop culture, even though it's explicitly used in jazz.
This is probably one of my favorite videos of this nature you've done. Don't get me wrong they're all really good but I have a special love for Surf and spaghetti western because when I was a kid my dad played a lot of it and I basically cut my teeth on it. Nothing sounds better than a twangy guitar through a clean Reverb drenched amp with a big slow Bigsby Bend.
If you don't know them all ready, the Danish band 'The good The bad' makes really intense flamenco/spaghetti/noise/surf inspired rock with baritone guitars and what can only be described as a coke fueled rage. Not really very twangy, but cool none the less.
If Leone didn't have a music budget for the "dollar" series, he certainly did for "Once Upon a Time In the West". In that film, each character had his own theme. The music and cinematography was great, the story was great, the script could have used editing. To be fair, I think I have only seen butchered versions of the original.
@@joaoferreira7091 - I knew what you were responding to before I even opened it. Crazy, huh? Yes, an amazing cast. Henry Fonda as the evil one, and he was damn good at it, set up the best "gun-fight" I've seen. And, within that gun-fight, Leone revealed 'the secret'. Wow!
I think you saw the US version whitout Director's cut MADE by Sergio Leone. I noticed the Italian and European versions of the movie are much Superior because they dont flow in chronological order but rather trough a series of flashbacks and time regressions. In the Us, it was decided to show the movie in chronological order, Which makes it pretty unwatchable to be honest. But maybe you saw the uncut version and you just found plotholes, mine is just an hypotesis.
Reverb............ is the Answer... Your welcome.. grew up watching these movies and just loved the Music since always.. thanks for the Post. Great channel
Just bought an old chapel house apartment in a village in northern italy and my saloon/ lounge just hums spaghetti western.. now getting into a new style of guitar playing, grazie your video tutorial helped a lot .
Great lesson! Been a fan of these tones and melodies way before I knew how to play. Little known fact: The tree with the hang rope in Good Bad and Ugly was stolen off some guys lawn in town while getting supplies because there were no trees in that land where the scene was shot. They needed an old creepy tree and so they pretended (the directors) they were city officials and told the guy at the house they had to remove it.
The penultimate good, bad, and the ugly shootout is IMHO the best use of music in a film... I find myself just watching that shootout on youtube JUST to admire how well crafted it is.
It seems like spaghetti western and spy movie music are both connected through a reverb filled surf rock approach, but spy movies tend to take it in a more big-band approach.
That guitar sound just immediately gives me associations to the hot backing sun and a wast space of dry sand. Even to a sunset in the middle of a hot clear skied summer night. That golden color from the sun. I don't even remember to have watched any spaghetti western from beginning to the end. I do have a memory of me half watching "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" when I was around 14 years old sorting my deliveries for my newspaper "ride" (On my ironhorse 😆) for the next day. And probably I've been present a few times for a short while when my stepfarther have watched those kinds of films (interestingly no matter what pop cultural song he plays on acoustic guitar, it tends to have this vibe of something spanish to it). The associations might've gotten into my subconsious mind.
I have to say that the first film of the famous Sergio Leone trilogy: A fistful of dollars, wasn't filmed in Southern Italy nor Southern Spain. It was filmed mainly in Central Spain, not too far from the city of Madrid itself! In fact, I live in the outskirts of Madrid and I can see everyday the mountain that appears behind the small town where most of the story is located.
@Phil McCrevice Adds to the anticipation and suspense. Made you wait even though you wanted it to happen which probably tormented the impatient. Did the job as a finally in my opinion.
@@arod919721 Absolutely Alex, high drama on the High Plains......vindication time for Colonel Mortimer....with a much needed assist from Clint.......he remembered the Colonel's request "Leave Indio to Me".
Ennio Morricone is on of the best and most influencial movie composer of all time. Up there with John Williams. And he's not even mentionned. All the "spaghetti western" music shown here are his.
This was REALLY good and was fun to watch. Love that spaghetti western AND instrumental surf sound. It makes sense that it caught on even though instrumental surf was pretty much a big deal but only for a couple of years in the early 60s. Great playing too of course! It's got to feel really cool to make those sounds.
Joe, I really enjoyed your comments. Those westerns were works of art. Incredibly good music, great story lines and the characters were awesome. Lee Van Cleef was fabulous. Thanks for the reminder of how good those films were.
Spaghetti western music gives me such nostalgia. I'm not super old by any means but my dad grew up on those westerns from the 60s and onwards so I've seen plenty of them and heard that music a lot.
Thank you! Great discussion! I love the music scenes of the Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallache trio of Spaghetti Westerns. The music is one major factor that gives these movies their cult status. In my opinion the composer, Ennio Morricone, is a genius! It's what sets these trios apart, along with Eastwood and Cleef. Plus even the titles ... A fist full of dollars, A few dollars more and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly ... was a stroke of genius ... it all worked ... the "experiment", as Clint thought of it, completely worked! I still watch them today and it's the music that takes you there.
Cool video. It's a fun genre with many many soundtracks beyond the 3 you mentioned. Morricone was a major figure, of course, but there were many others. Moreover, Morricone was incredibly versatile - most people associate him with spaghetti westerns, but he also did incredible scores in horror, crime thrillers, dramas, etc.
Another cool thing, the grunts and hollers you hear in the music was a carryover from Japanese Kabuki theater called Kakegoe, meant to emphasize drama and call attention to the stage. This is because the original Fistful of Dollars was a retelling of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, where a wandering mercenary/ronin arrives at a town in feudal Japan that lords are contesting over and each try to hire him as a body guard to turn the tides.
The gallop of a horse, the locomotive's chug, the sound of breaking waves, the pounding of the drums, the rumble of a stampede - it starts with the rhythm. Add to that the musical styles of southern European countries bordering the Mediterranean sea, and you begin to understand the interplay between Surf and Spaghetti Western. Then add in reverb. In Surf it's referred to 'drip', but in Spaghetti Western it's more of an echo; it feels like the heat of the blistering sun pounding down and bouncing off the landscape (think canyons) and the people that makes a sizzling hiss. The sound effects fill in and accentuate the gaps.
This was such a fantastic video to stumble upon! I've been listening to loads of incredible spaghetti weston songs recently that got spurred on by a Fontaines DC gig I went to in December. Love it.
Ennio Morricone is a genius as a composer. He got what was popular (surf music), applied the style to western and combines with his own themes and you have spaghetti western. He has much more on the table than spa. western, on his later film scores he did the same with psychedelic, rock and funk music.
I've enjoyed listening to these soundtracks for years, and it's good to hear about the different major and minor keys. Other than whips, bells, gunshots, and twangy electric guitar, another identifying factor of these films was of course the whistling.
Joe you are great explaining and transmitting the feeling of spaghetti western music !. Great job! and the sound of your guitar transported me to the time I was 15 years old watching those great movies.Thank you!
2:21 this kind of thing bewilders me. He's playing 1-5-8 1-5-8 but it really DOES feel "minor" as he describes it. Can someone explain that? Is my mind filling in the minor third, whereas it could have gone major in my mind? By the way this video really has astute analysis - even trolls can't argue that the video title claim is not right on the money.
He, maybe accidentally, hits the minor third too. That, coupled with the surrounding chords, probably gives you that minor context even if he's mainly just hitting the root and fifth of the minor tonic.
Dimitri Tiomkin was the composer responsible for the beginnings of this genre. he'd been working on the standard fare in Hollywood since the early 1940s. the times were changing by the early 50s, and the lusher stylings of Newman, Waxman, etc were fading. two of the first of these new types were Shane and high noon. Victor Young (stella by starlight) wrote shane, using mainly the major pentatonic mode. Tiomkin wrote high noon, again with simple harmonies and diatonic melody. folk like. of course these themes were very adaptable to orchestration in any number of ways, and you can that in the underscores. microgroove recording were starting and the studios saw a way to make more money by having a catchy theme tune included in the movie. tex ritter had a huge hit with high noon. it was on for young and old...........Frankie laine? Gunfight at OK Corral? another Tiomkin masterpiece. laine's vocal could have easily been a twangy guitar. Rawhide theme = Tiomkin/Laine. before Leone made the dollar westerns he and Morricone watched/listened to numerous Hollywood westerns, cherry-picking the best features. so, Tiomkin was one of their models.
Good video. One historical note: Morricone has a very strong classical music background, so i don't think he ever thought about surf music composing spaghetti western soundtracks. :) He always said that he usually try to use the sounds of the film setting, so for example he used machines sounds in "The working class go to paradise". Using real-life sounds was also a trend in avant-garde music at the time. He understand his work as a film music composer, it's like writing music for opera. And as a young composer he was trying to use modern instrument to get new sounds to work with.
I thought the intro of this video was really cool, it reminds me of my grandfather. He's from the island of Antigua, he plays guitar and likes things with the old western esthetic. Spaghetti western films are some of his favorites. I need to get my hands on one of those guitars for him before he passes away.
....AWESOME!!!!! I LOVE SPAGHETTI WESTERN" (WHAT I CALL "WESTERN" MUSIC!!!!), AND "SURF GUITAR" Music!!!!......IT'S THE BEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THANKS VERY MUCH FOR THIS SHORT DEMO VIDEO!!! GREAT STUFF!!! ["SHARED" ON GAB.AI ]
Why is it so cool? Two words - Ennio Morricone. Also noted, the video completely left out the magnificent trumpet work in some of the pieces, as well as the haunting and timeless vocals.
Carlos I I’m assuming they had a quick idea and went w it and filmed it super quick. If they got anything wrong then that would mean another comment which then leads to a better chance of appearing on someone’s feed.
The best example of early surf type music is “Cry for a Shadow” by a band called The Beatles. Little know song fromAnthology One but it has a surf or Spaghetti Western vibe
I loved this video. Always really liked spaghetti western music and now I know why: it's basically the reverb from surf music except with the gallop rhythm, which I prefer as it's done a lot in metal.
Stumbled across your channel and I must say you nailed it. I grew up watching these movies and even when I was ten the music had me glued to my seat wondering "What's next?" I have always loved guitar even though I played trumpet. This music is very versatile, it can be applied to almost any tempo. I will subscribe good job. I'm going to go through you videos searching for guitar enlightenment. Guitarist reflect their emotions even when it's a rant but help me figure out the Isley Brothers guitar Fantastic Voyage.
I love this! Just keep going and following your instincts. Peeling back the curtain on movie music is particularly great because you have something to show on-picture. RU-vid friendly.
Amazing vid really! Not a Guitar player myself (used to scratch my acoustic guitar a few years ago) but I love Westerns and loved the breakdown on the rhythm, majors opposed to minors and feelings they bring up!
Howard Roberts on that haunting lick Through a Benson amp and "The Telecaster That Changed The World" If you can find a clean recording of the tune, the sound is just incredible.
