This tune is named for the Ramada in Kill Devil Hills, NC. There is an abundance of drama with the various characters that work and play there.
Waitstaff, bartenders, maintenance people, managers, housekeeping, front desk, vacationers, musicians. All are witnesses and participants. I play there every week.
Here is the mp3: Dramada
Here is the sheet music:
One reason that this tune is interesting is because it is atonal. Meaning that it does not belong to any key. It is cereal…er, serial music.
Basically, Serial music employs a series of notes and does not repeat any notes until the series has been fully realized. It can get very complicated, but his tune is fairly simple.
All i did was compose my tone row(the series) and then began to noodle around on the piano until i found some rhythmic material that sounded good to me.
by the way the row is: C, Gb, D, Bb, F, E, C#, G, B, D#, G#, A
I can’t recall exactly how i arrived at this particular row.
If you follow the notes from beginning to end, you find the row a total of 4 times. Sometimes notes are enharmonically respelled to accommodate reading and harmony.
I basically just hung the chords from the melody and definitely broke some rules about chord progressions, but that makes for interesting improvising.
You can solo on this tune using the chord changes, or you can use the row and apply it as you see fit, virtually ignoring the harmony altogether. FUN! FUN!