I’m getting much more comfortable using Dorico now, after decades of using Finale for my music notation. The bulk of my composing and arranging is for big band, so putting together a couple of new big band charts has been helping me learn the new software. It’s a different work flow compared to Finale, but as I’ve gotten used to it I find Dorico has some very nice features that I think are good improvements. The engraving side of working is particularly easier than with Finale, as Dorico I think does a better job of initially laying out the score and parts for printing and generally require less editing than I’ve found on Finale.

Like the last chart I recently wrote, this one is pretty straight ahead. I messed around with a couple of things harmonically, such as keeping all the V chords as C7sus, sometimes even a C7sus(b9), an idea I picked up from Tom Coppola, who was a pianist that I taught and performed with before his passing. The ii chords tend to be a tritone substitution, in this particular case a Db7. So instead of a standard ii-V-I I wrote bVI7-V7sus-I13 (Db7-C7sus-F13 in this key).

I also played around with the trumpet section playing with plunger mutes quite a bit, which gives it somewhat a Basie style feel to it, there’s definitely a Sammy Nestico sound to this one. The trumpet and trombone solo are also meant to be played with plunger mutes. That’s where the title comes in, It’s the Plumber I’ve Come to Fix the Sink.

Apparently when I was a kid I found this cartoon hilarious.

Over time, this line became an inside joke in my family, to the point of where I still remember us joking around with this line well after I had forgotten this cartoon. When I came up with this line as a title for this chart I looked it up, just to make sure that someone hadn’t already used it for a big band tune, and found this cartoon. It brought back some memories of the TV show Electric Company and some other childhood experiences.

Here’s a MIDI realization of the actual chart. The sound library I used for the horns is Atomic Big Band Horns. The rhythm section and solos were generated in Band-in-a-Box, using their “Real Instrument” samples, so the solos aren’t quite the style I wanted, but ok for a demo. I changed around the EQ of the solos in a DAW (Logic Pro, if you’re curious) and added a guitar “wa-wa” plugin to simulate plunger mutes as much as I could.