The brass instruments produce the melody during the chorus. During the verses, the guitar and brass seem to share the melody over the bassline. There are vocals throughout the song.
The cover song I selected is "Knock on Wood" by DJ Stephanie. This song was released in 2010. It has a much faster tempo of 147 beats per minute. It also has a happy feeling and is slightly corny, but really makes you want to get up and dance.
The lead synthesizer creates the melody. It is a very fat combination of sine and square wave oscillators, detuned to perfection. This song has a series of buildups and breakdowns before and after the 'dancy' parts. The vocals are only played during the breaks and buildups. The hard kick takes the place of the vocals during the 'dancy' parts of the song.
When comparing and contrasting music, I think it is often helpful to analyze the audience of the songs. The original song was meant to be played on the radio or played for a group of dancers at a restaurant or club. The cover song was meant to be played for tens of thousands of people with ridiculous amounts of energy at extremely loud volumes.
This being said, it makes sense that the cover song has a better sense of rhythm. The rhythm of a song is the part element that drives you to dance. The percussive elements are much louder in the cover song than in the original version. This could be because the focus of the original song was the vocals. When people listened to this music, they wanted to hear and sing along to the lyrics. With the cover song, people want to hear the kick and bass.
At large events, people will sing along to the melody of the song. To get the audience more involved, producers will use well known lyrics in a song, such as "Knock On Wood". This gives the audience something corny to scream out, but everyone knows the words. This creates a very positive relationship between the DJ/Producer and the audience. This positive energy is needed to drive the artist's success, as well as the events, which generally run until 7am.
I like the Stephanie version better. It really gives me that "hands-up" party feeling. The original would be nice to listen to with friends if we were in the mood for something real goofy. The Stephanie version is just a more modern dance production that I am very accustomed to. There we not nearly as many ways to digitally create music in the 60's as there are now. This has opened up new ways of producing music, as well as simply making it sound better. I do think that older original versions of songs can be very appealing though. They provide an interesting contrast to the digitally produced music of today. I enjoy stepping outside of the digital world every once in a while to refresh my musical palate.
Lastly, this is the soundscape I created with Ian Bullington using GarageBand. Our term was 'Affection', which was difficult to exemplify.
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