Friend Of The Devil – The Grateful Dead

I like simple things. Especially when it comes to guitar arrangements for the single guitarist/singer. The less there is to worry about, as far as playing is concerned anyway, the more I can enjoy myself and put all I can into a song or performance.

But what, exactly, is “simple?” Depending upon your skill level, something that someone else says is simple can seem well beyond your abilities. Present abilities, you should say. As you evolve as a guitarist, improving and adding new skills and techniques and knowledge to your playing, your concept of “simple” will also evolve.

This is one reason why I spend so much time stressing that you don’t worry about playing “by the recording.” If you’re a beginner, there’s little point in comparing your abilities to those of someone who’s been playing professionally longer than you’ve been alive. Unless, of course, you simply like being frustrated. Personally, I don’t think much good can come of it.

But a lot of good can come from the enjoyment you get in revisiting old songs and bringing something new to them. Arrangements, like your abilities, also constantly evolve. Some people can play the same song over and over again and never be bored because they actually play it differently each time.

So to demonstrate this point, let’s take a simple song, make a simple arrangement of it and then let it evolve a little bit. I guess that means hauling out our friendly disclaimer:

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

For this lesson, we’ll be using Friend Of The Devil, a song originally by the Grateful Dead and covered by so many artists (Lyle Lovett and Counting Crows come immediately to mind) that it’s hard to list. Technically, it only uses four chords: G, C, D and Am, which you hopefully feel comfortable enough with by now.

If you take a look at a very simple chord sheet for this song, you’ll probably find something like the following:

As I mentioned, four chords. All we need do is come up with a strumming pattern we like (and can easily play) (or learn) and we’re set. Here is one that should work well with this song. Remember that the “D” stands for “downstroke” and the “U” denotes an “uspstroke:”

This particular pattern is actually based on the rhythm guitar of the recorded song. With very little practice, you should find it comes easily to your strumming hand. Start with the “full chord” version and then, when you feel you’re ready, give the “bass / strum” example (also known, believe it or not, as the “boom-chuck” approach) a try. You’re now able to play this song and add it to your repertoire. End of lesson…

Okay, you know me better than that! After all, at this stage in your guitar playing life, you should be able to get to this point on your own. If we’re all agreed that, so far, we think this is simple enough to play, shall we move on?

Can you play a G major scale? Whoa! You’re probably wondering how we jumped to this topic! Fair warning, if you’re someone who does his or her damnedest to stay away from “traditional” things like scales, theory, knowing that the note on the third fret of the A string is actually called “C” and not “just play this,” then I’m going to try to teach you something. Feel free to just go on and “read the pictures” if you will, but everything will be easily explained in the text. So please give it a read at some point if you’re having any troubles.

Back to the matter at hand – Since Friend Of The Devil is in the key of G, it doesn’t hurt to be aware of the G major scale, which is conveniently written out below:

You’ll notice that I’ve placed the G note written on the second line up from the bottom of the staff at two different places on your guitar. You can play it as the open G string and you can also find this note located at the fifth fret of the D string. You already know this, of course, from manually tuning your guitar. If not, then consider it something to keep somewhere in your head among the somewhat important bits of information already there, such as the birthdays of your friends and family.

If you listen to the G major scale and then listen to a recording of the song, you’ll hear that the “signature guitar riff” is nothing more than a descending G Major scale:

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Well, playing just that descending scale seems simple enough. But something you should know is that some folks will decide that using this descending G Major scale means that you should also go and change the chord names. This will involve using slash chords and will make the “simple” chord sheet look a little more like these examples:

What does that mean for us simple folks? Not really a lot. We’re going to just think about the descending scale as “passing tones” and just go about our business of adding some chords to the notes of the descending scale. I’ve kept the basic G and C chords of the verses and turned them into slash chords simply so that you can keep track of what note of the scale you’re on:

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Again, with a very little bit of concentrated effort, this will be something that you should be able to accomplish in relatively little time. If you use this pattern for the verses and go back to the “bass / strum” pattern for the choruses and bridge, you’ve now got a more complicated arrangement that is still simple for you to play.

You might have noted in these last examples that I start with the G at the fifth fret of the D string instead of the open G string. You can certainly use either, but when we get into the following verse patterns, you should see (and hear) the advantages. Before we do that, though, this would be a good place to bring up that you can play the verses just like this, and then add the “boom-chuck” approach for the choruses and bridge and have a perfectly good arrangement for this song.

And, quick as you please, you now have two possible arrangements before going any further. And, for some of you, either of these two arrangements is a great place to start. The whole point of this lesson is to show you how you can “grow” an arrangement and to do that, you’ve got to start with what you know and then add on to it as you learn more, because, at some point, you’re going to be learning more and looking for more.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’ve managed to get a handle on playing simple arpeggios, such as those in the lesson on House of the Rising Sun. Having that under your belt, you might want to take a stab at applying your arpeggio playing to an arrangement, much like the first section of the following example:

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You can hear we’ve given the song a very different character. In order to further demonstrate the simple, yet drastic differences you can make in an arrangement, I played the first “option for verse pattern” with just my fingers and then again using a pick. Again, there’s a very distinct feeling with each of these approaches. The first time out sounds very folkish while the second smacks of bluegrass. The notes played are exactly the same, it’s just a matter of the method you use to bring those notes to your listener.

Now let’s say that you’ve become a little more adept at picking your arpeggios. Then you might try the second section of this last example, called (appropriately enough) “another option for verse.” This involves a little more crosspicking than the first section, but with some concentrated effort, shouldn’t be beyond your capabilities. Notice the slight variation in the bass line in the final measure, caused by hammering-on from the open A string to the B note at the second fret. This is not from the original recording, but because it sounds pretty cool so I’ve added it to the mix. Also, adding that full G chord at the end kind of punctuates the end of the phrase, creating some interesting dynamics by giving the song a little more punch.

So now you have three or four ways of playing the verses. That’s not too bad of a start. Shall we take a look at the chorus? Because the verse is so busy with its descending bass line, a return to something simple would be a good first approach to the chorus:

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Rather than using a straight “bass / strum” or “boom-chuck” accompaniment, this “basic chorus” employs an alternating bass line, much like that in the Margaritaville lesson here at Guitar Noise. Please note that the rhythm is slightly broken up every other measure, which tosses in an extra bass note on the fourth beat instead of a replay of the chord. Generally speaking, the third and/or fourth beats of a measure before a chord change are good places to throw in a fill or two and we’re playing a very simple two-note fill here.

Another thing to notice is how the last measure of D contains an ascending bass line – the final E (second fret of the D string) and F# (fourth fret) – which leads us back to the G note that starts the verse. This is called a “turnaround,” a phrase that you’re probably familiar with from playing the blues. A turnaround is a chord progression or riff that leads the listening back to the song’s beginning chord, which often (but not always) is the home or root chord of the key of the song. The bonus to you, as a player, is that this particular turnaround gets you right in position for the verse pattern.

This arrangement of the chorus is fairly straightforward and shouldn’t give you much more trouble than doing a straight strum of the chords or a typical “bass / strum.” And you know what I’m going to say next, that you can add to this arrangement according to your abilities. Let’s say that you’ve been working on your hammer-ons and pull-offs and want to incorporate them more into your playing. Starting with the basic chorus, we can add to it like this:

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The pull-offs in the second measure and the hammer-ons in the fourth measure are, respectively, all based on the D and Am chords. So playing these doesn’t involve any extraneous finger movement. I told you I like simple things! Measures six through eight use small walking bass lines along with Am and C chord arpeggios before heading back to our alternating bass pattern D from the basic chorus pattern.

The final measure of this “embellished” chorus contains a different turnaround to get us back to our verse pattern. It’s the flashiest thing we’ve tried so far and, to be honest, is a little more than what I would consider teaching a pure beginner. But what’s learning without a challenge or two? These are just notes of the G major scale, centered around the open D major chord. In the MP3, I’m playing this very slowly and you can hear that I’m using alternating picking to play this. When I get to the final A note (second fret of the G string), I then shift my finger to the second fret of the D string (the E note) in order to slide up to the G note at the fifth fret and once again begin the verse pattern. This slide takes place very quickly. It’s almost like “Oops! I didn’t mean to hit that note! Here’s the note I want!”

Some people might find it easier to slide from the F natural (third fret of the D string) as shown in this example:

There’s not much of a difference between this two, but they do have very different sounds. So if you decide to use either of these variations of the chorus, take your time to hear which one you like and also experiment and see what fingering works well with you.

Because we’ve been so busy with the verses and choruses, I find the bridge a good place to lay back a little. You can, if you decide to do so, use the basic strumming patterns you learned at the beginning of this lesson. That will sound perfectly fine.

I’ve come up with this arrangement of the bridge, which is recorded painfully slowly on the accompanying MP3 file. You’ll hear it more at speed in the final MP3:

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This is pretty much straight quarter note arpeggios up until the very end when it reverts back to the patterns we used in the embellished chorus section.

The song ends with a final verse and chorus and has one of those “unresolved” feelings because D is the last chord. Here’s an MP3, which contains a verse, chorus, bridge and then final verse and chorus. You’ll hear different ideas that we’ve touched upon in this lesson as well as some expansions on these ideas (other arpeggios and staggered rhythms) and also a few genuinely bad clunkers!

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I hope you had fun with this lesson and that you enjoy playing around with this song. I also hope that you understand that, as you grow as a guitarist, you should be able to go back to some of the songs you played as absolute beginner and bring something new to them. A lot of the differences that people perceive as “beginning” or “intermediate” guitarists are simply the ability to make a more interesting strum or to add a little embellishment here and there. Taking the things you’ve learned and applying them to what you already know is one of the best ways to jumpstart this process.

If you had fun with this lesson, I’d like to encourage you to take a look at Time After Time, our next Songs for Intermediates lesson, which should be up sometime before the middle of July. It will take a lot of the ideas we used here and expand on them. If you can handle the Bookends lesson on the Easy Songs for Beginners pages, you’ll find Time After Time, while a bit of a challenge, within your capabilities.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace