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“Get Down Tonight”

By Tom Brislin

A staple of club date repertoire, “Get Down Tonight” was the first of a string of No. 1 hits for KC and the Sunshine Band in the 1970s. The song’s intro features a series of very groovy, rapid licks that sound as though they were played on a synth, like a Minimoog. In reality, the part was originally played on guitar but recorded at halfspeed! The resulting sound is not only often mistaken for synthesizer, but it almost always falls to the keyboard player in a band to recreate it, since guitars can’t actually play that high. That’s certainly how The Sunshine Band approaches it these days as well.

To get the sound, you can search your keyboard’s guitar sound banks (if it has any), and look for a clean tone with no overdrive. Transpose the tone up an octave or two if you can, and get your pitch bender ready. If you’re creating the tone from scratch on an analog synth, you’ll need a polyphonic sound, as there are lots of fourths happening later on in the song. Use sawtooth waveforms, with an instantaneous plucky attack and a reasonably quick decay. Make sure the release is instant as soon as you lift your fingers off the keys, so the lines are super-clean and tight sounding.

All the lines in “Get Down Tonight” are based on the F minor pentatonic scale. The intro features lines similar to those shown in Example 1. When playing in a cover band, you may find you’ll be asked to transpose the song to other keys. This can be for a variety of reasons. For instance, the vocal range of the band’s lead singer could necessitate transposing down (or up) a few half-steps. Bands with horn players tend to favor keys with flats in the key signature (like the original key of “Get Down Tonight”), while guitar-oriented bands lean towards keys with sharps in the key signature (especially the key of E). This is yet another reason for practicing everything in all keys!