Fingering starts to get a little tricky at this point. The bass is almost always played with the thumb, but deciding which of the other fingers to use somehow always comes up for debate on advanced arrangements. I always go by the “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” method. Therefore, just go for it! If you are stumbling while playing, obviously think about using different fingers. Also, don’t be a two-fingered player – that will keep you from being able to tackle the tough stuff. If you need exercises to develop either hand, there are tons of them on the net. If you’re still stumped, e-mail me and I’ll be more than happy to point you in a direction.

Example #1 is the melody (I just made one up) only.
Example #2 is the bass and the melody
Example #3 is the bass, melody, and rhythmic parts of the chords.

Click Here and hear a mp3 of me playing Examples 1,2, and 3 in order.

When creating a chord melody, the melody is top priority. Also, when creating a chord melody there are many times that the melody needs to be modified because of some kind of reason. If you change the melody around, but it still sounds like the song (or just sounds good), then keep it! I prefer not to change the melody when the parts fit together well. But, if I’m having problems I make adjustments.

Speaking of adjustments, I needed to make them in this lesson. I decided to try and keep the melody true and make my needed changes either to the bass or the rhythm chord parts. For the bass parts in measures 2 and 4, I decided to let the bass ring for two beats (half note) and play the melody only for those four notes. This also means that I “let go of the two note” rhythmic chord parts. Why? It sounded good and I was having trouble inserting the bass rhythm and chord rhythm.

Altering chords can sometimes be necessary if the melody is in conflict with your fingerings. The guitar is a bit limited when trying to put so many things at the same time together. In this case, there is an “E” note in the melody when a Bm7b5 chord is being played. At this point, I changed the “chord” for that moment and inserted the “E” (string 2 fret 5 in measures 2 and 4) and played parts of the chord (fret 7 on strings 3 and 4) while the “B” in the bass (string 6 fret 7) was ringing. It sounded good, so I kept it.

This practice arrangement is to help you to play a tiny chord melody of five measures and get the feel for a Latin chord melody. My main goal is to give you an idea of how they are put together and spark your interest in creating your own! The trick to making this stuff happen is to be able to “Think Out of the Box”. So bend the rules when necessary! If it sounds good, keep it. If it sounds bad, change it. If you have any questions about this lesson, I would be more than happy to answer them.

My e-mail: peter@petersimms.com

Enjoy! … Peter Simms

Also check out… Finding A Latin Groove – Part 1

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This is not as hard as it sounds, but it does take a while to get. And…. there is an effective process that I use to help my students learn it.

1st. This is a finger style song using your thumb, index, middle, and ring finger to pluck with. Try and make the chords sound decent before trying the rhythm. When playing Am7, thumb=6th string, index=4th string, middle=3rd string, ring=2nd srtring. Thus, pluck strings 6,4,3,2 (not 5 or 1) at the same time. If it sounds good, move to the next: Bm7b5: pluck same strings, but you’re fingering a new chord…. E7: pluck same strings, but you’re fingering a new chord…. Am9 is just a way to end the progression (an extension of Am7).

2nd. Focus on the bass line – the thumb does all the work. This is done on purpose. You will not have to worry about moving your thumb around for this exercise. It is always plucking the 6th string. You can focus on the “groove” (rhythm). When plucking the strings with your index, middle, and ring finger, hold the fingers together as a unit. You should be able to feel the sides of the fingers touching each other. Once you get the hang of this, it makes it a lot easier.

3rd. Now that you have the picking hand working, it’s time to work with the fretboard hand. The idea is to create separation of parts (bass player and chord player). By relaxing your hand just after plucking the small chords with your fingers, a punchy chordal rhythmic pattern can be produced. At the “same time” remember that you want the bass notes to sound relaxed and ringing (especially when the 6th string is open). Take a listen to the MP3, you will hear the feeling of two players.

Your main goal is to create a nice Latin groove with a bass line. If you came up with something different but it accomplished this goal…. you’re there! If you have any questions about this lesson, I would be more than happy to answer them. My e-mail: peter@petersimms.com

Enjoy!

Also check out… Finding A Latin Groove – Part 2

Knowledge of the guitar is actually knowledge of the fret board, and how the interrelation of finger technique and string creates sound. This basic knowledge can be transferred to other members of the stringed instrument family. Knowing the fret board provides a platform allowing the guitar player to “more easily” move from guitar, to 12-string guitar, to bass, to mandolin, to violin, to baritone guitar, and to Square Neck Dobro.

I believe that a guitarist who doubles on another instrument becomes a better guitarist.

A limited knowledge and the ability to play a few songs or a solo on a second stringed instrument teaches the guitarist about melody, tone and the nature of music itself.

We can often become lost and isolated in the world of the guitar. Discovering a second stringed instrument breaks loose old practice habits, offers something new and unusual to practice, and provides that “WOW” factor on stage.

A perfect example of a possible additional instrument for the guitarist is the Square Neck Dobro.

Square Neck Dobro is a generic term for a resonator guitar, which has a neck shaped like a two by four piece of wood. This is played by laying the guitar body across the knees in the seated position. A Square Neck is open tuned, usually in “G” (gbdgbd), has a very high action, and is fretted by using a variety of square or rounded steel bars.

Most players of this instrument use metal (or plastic, or any combination thereof) thumb and fingerpicks on the right hand. Strumming or finger picking is accomplished with the same method used for a regular acoustic guitar, with a slight adaptation to the horizontal position across the lap.

The interesting part of the Square Neck Dobro is the usage of the steel bar for fretting chords or single melody lines. This instrument offers the ability to do either in an open tuning, with the limitations inherent in that tuning, of course. For example, in open G tuning, standard minor chords are difficult to obtain easily. However, striking root elements of the difficult chord, or combining a drone and melody note, often covers the situation — especially in a group setting.

I came to the Square Neck Dobro not through its usual styles of primitive country music, bluegrass or “Americana,” but in a search for tone textures for my new CD, The Cultivation of Grace.

I was searching for a specific, swampy, spooky, Southern American tone for one of the cuts, Georgia Nights, and happened to pick up a Johnson Square Neck in a music store. I was easily hooked. The overriding sound texture of the Square Neck is a ringing, slide tone with a high timbre very different from bottleneck slide guitar. Its tone and texture are unmistakable and, although not usable universally on every song, the tone may be that irreplaceable element you’ve been looking for.

The “sliding” nature of chords and notes on the Square Neck allows you to play behind the beat of the music, incorporating another unique element in your music.

I’ve used the Square Neck as both melody and rhythm instrumentation on Cultivation of Grace. Those who may be interested can pull up an mp3 of Georgia Nights at www.guitar9.com to hear how, with no background on the instrument and a little bit of study, an average guitar player was able to incorporate the Square Neck. I also employed standard bottleneck guitar in conjunction with the Square Neck. You can clearly hear the differences between the tonalities of the instruments.

Some may be hesitant to buy a Square Neck Dobro due to fear of a new instrument or cost factors.

The Square Neck appeared to me to be very user friendly as long as one kept the proper perspective and enjoyed the learning curve. In very few practice sessions, one could be picking out simple melody lines such as Amazing Grace, and begin obtaining the feel for usage of the bar and the slide technique for basic major chords. However, learning the Square Neck is not a matter of replacing guitar playing technique or styling.

Still, in a relatively short period of time, I was using the Square Neck in gigging with my band Local Fourcast on specific numbers. It added a wonderful touch to our tone.

In relation to consumer costs, the Square Neck Dobro is available through many of the Korean importers of guitars, such as Johnson, Samick, and the like, for a cost comparable to a student guitar. One must incorporate into the costs a bar and the usage of special, but not overly expensive, Dobro strings. To complete the picture, multiple beginners’ how-to videos are available for the Square Neck, which really do assist the guitarist in playing this unique instrument.

I realize that the guitar alone could be enough of a challenge for anyone. I look toward comparable stringed instruments as means for making practice fun, and as wonderful methods to provide changes to your personal sonic palette. And, last but not least, such instruments are windows into the greater world of music and its relationship to the guitar.

Besides, you never know when that special band is looking for the person who can play guitar, mandolin, Square Neck, baritone guitar, octave mandolin, and …

Stairway to Heaven holds a special place in the heart of most guitar players. As well as being one of radio’s most requested songs it is also the most popular choice for guitarists learning their first song. Unfortunately, so many novice musicians make the social faux pas of trying to play the first few bars of this song in local music stores around the world. Once you pass this stage of development, your musical ability will improve. You then may discover that many other Led Zeppelin songs can also serve as a springboard to a higher musical level. Zeppelin songs are full of catchy rock and blues riffs that any beginning guitarist should load into their arsenal.

Joining the ranks of the rock dinosaurs and one of the greatest bands of all time, Zeppelin has suffered at the hands of critics who tried to categorize their music. Sources like Rolling Stone magazine still label the band as a hard rock/heavy metal, while many writers over the years have credited them with being the first heavy metal band. Considering the variety of different genres the band explored on their eight studio albums, they manage to escape just about any label you can place on them. At the same time every Zeppelin song is stamped with the band’s own recognizable sound.

This month Guitar Noise is looking at different musical genres. This article, rather than being a history of Zeppelin, will take you through some of the bands’ songs that explored different genres.

Led Zeppelin I

According to popular legend, the album Led Zeppelin I (1969) was recorded in less than 30 hours. Jimmy Page once said that everything the band was to become was hinted at in that first album. Despite a predominantly blues and hard rock edge to most songs, there are a few stand-out tracks that show an early interest other genres.

The album’s second track is Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You. Originally an acoustic folk song, Page and Plant transform it into a song with sharp contrasts between light and heavy sounds. It is a mostly acoustic version with some overdubbed electric parts around the third verse. The chords themselves are the same throughout the song and are used for both the picked parts of the song and the heavier strummed parts.

Generally a good song for practicing finger picking this might be a good second song to learn after “Stairway.” Try these patterns for the intro and verses:

And then use these chords for the heavier chorus part of the song.

Another track standing out from the blues rock feel of the album is Black Mountain Side. This instrumental acoustic song uses the altered tuning DADGAD. The unusual tuning gives the song a folk or world music sound that makes you think of a far off place. To play this song you must down all your strings down to DADGAD. If you have tuned it correctly just strumming all the strings open will produce a nice warm sound. The following pattern sounds like the song’s intro:

Led Zeppelin II

While Led Zeppelin I was indeed a blues influenced album, it was with the release of Led Zeppelin II later in 1969 that the band earned their heavy metal label. Zeppelin toured endlessly that year and the album was recorded at various studios during the tour. While the album does have a lot of hard rock and blues, there is one stand out track that doesn’t really belong in either genre. Ramble On is a traveling song that mixes acoustic and electric guitars to produce a kind of a rolling, rambling song. One of the things that give the beginning of this song its distinctive ringing sound is the use of open strings. You could come up with an alternate arrangement of the song using first position chords but the ringing acoustic sound wouldn’t have the same power. Here is what the real intro should look like:

Led Zeppelin III

Perhaps the most surprising of all their albums, Led Zeppelin III (1970) makes a sharp turn towards folk music and displays a strong interest in mystical lore. The result is one of Zeppelin’s strongest albums. To write the songs for this album, the band retreated to a small rural cottage in Wales. The album still has some pretty heavy stuff, for example the fast driving riff and wailing vocal of Immigrant Song. However, the album also contains many mellow acoustic tracks. A definite standout track is the band’s arrangement of the traditional folk song Gallows Pole, which features a banjo solo played by Page. In 1994 Page and Plant reunited for an MTV special called No Quarter and their reworked version of Gallows Pole included a medieval instrument called the hurdy gurdy.

These are the intro and verse chords for Gallows Pole:

As well as showcasing the band’s interest in mythology, mysticism and folk music from England, this album also contains their first attempt at incorporating world music into their songs.

The song Friends, also used for the MTV reunion, employs open C tuning that provides a heavy droning sound throughout the song. The sound is very eastern, and new for the band. After tuning your guitar to CGCGCE try playing all the strings open.

For the verse continue playing the C chord while moving one finger along the high e string from the 3rd to 2nd fret and then up to the 5th fret.

Also on Led Zeppelin III is the song Bron Yr Aur Stomp, named after the cottage in which many of the songs for this album were written. Requiring a dexterous and strong hand, this song requires a guitar tuned to CFCFAF (from low to high). The distinct sound comes from the numerous pull-offs, hammer-ons and slides.

The Album Commonly Referred To As Led Zeppelin IV

If anything, the band heightened their interest in myth and mysticism with the 1971 album that marked their return to rock music. Diverse in sounds, the band’s untitled album (commonly referred to as Led Zeppelin IV) was to be their most commercially enduring album. Song titles like Rock And Roll tell you what the music is all about here. It was here that Zeppelin produced their most radio friendly hits: Stairway to Heaven (folk meets classical meets heavy metal), Rock and Roll (a tribute to early rock n’ roll), and Black Dog (featuring one of Page’s most memorable riffs).

The bands interest in what some dubbed “mystical folk rock” is heard in the mandolin flavored The Battle of Evermore. This track featured guest vocalist Sandy Denny, whose haunting voice makes this a truly mystical duet. The distinctive mandolin sound cannot be replaced by a guitar.

The droning guitar of Four Sticks also earned it a space on the eastern influenced 1994 reunion album and tour. Play this one in standard tuning and be sure to let the open E string ring out. The intro looks something like this:

The notes in this song are like power chords without the third. This sound is strong enough to carry the entire song.

Houses Of The Holy And Physical Graffiti

There are those who think the band peaked and then went downhill after Led Zeppelin IV, but this is an attitude based on not knowing what truly motivates an artist. Zeppelin always focused more on producing albums rather than songs. The later albums are influenced by an even wider selection of genres outside mainstream music.

With Houses of The Holy (1973) the band began broadening their musical horizons more than ever before. Check out the funky bass that starts off The Crunge. Then listen to the reggae style D’yer Mak’er. Guitar Noise already has a lessons on Reggae that can help you get the rhythm right. The song is made up mostly of a C Am F G pattern that is repeated over and over. Try picking the song like this:

In 1975 Zeppelin released the double album Physical Graffiti. The band returned to familiar territory with the instrumental acoustic track Bron Yr Aur. This song differs from Bron Yr Stomp. Here the tuning is CACGCE. Once in tune, try the following patterns:

Also using an alternate tuning on this album is Black Country Woman, which uses an open G tuning, DGDGBD, and relies mostly on open strings to form the chords. If you listen to the album you will recognize the sound of this song as mandolin. But in this tuning the guitar offers a suitable alternative.

Finally, there is one Zeppelin classic from this album that cannot be overlooked. Kashmir is an example of what Zeppelin did best. They drew influence from different music styles, travel and their own experiences to come up with a song that sounds just like them. No one before or after them has sounded anything like Kashmir. To play this correctly also requires an alternate tuning. Tune your guitar to DADGAD. The main riffs look like this:

The influence here is definitely eastern in origin. Page and Plant chose Kashmir as their concert closer during their reunion tour and album. They accentuated the song’s eastern influence by featuring an orchestra made up of some Egyptian musicians playing their native traditional instruments.

Next time you listen to a Zeppelin song you may consider that they are much more than a blues rock or heavy metal band. The influence they have had on today’s music is great, and no other bands sound or will ever sound quite like them. If you are from a younger generation, it is not too late to see some incarnation of the band live. Robert Plant still tours, sometimes with Page, sometimes without. And Page is often out and about with the Black Crowes, adding some southern harmony to the old Zeppelin songs.

Led Zeppelin paved the way for entire new genres of music to be formed, by not fearing to musically tread anywhere. Of course, it will always be necessary to categorize their music. How else would you be able to find their music in a music shop?

If you would like to do some further reading up on the band I suggest you look at the following links:

Led Zeppelin Guitar Tab
Led Zeppelin Biography
Buckeye’s best of Led Zeppelin on the Net

But, again, of course, we would never apply this same procedure to ourselves. We have depth, we have complexity (did I say “complexity?” How rude of me! My heartfelt apologies – the word should obviously be plural!). We transcend any single label that one might happen to tag us with, don’t we?

Genres fascinate me even more as a songwriter than they intrigue me as a music theorist. Often, when I was just starting out playing and writing with a band, we’d say, “We need a Neil Young type of song…” and someone in the group would proceed to write a song in the style of one of the artists or bands whose songs we covered. But there were other times when I would come to the group with a song that I’d written with one specific style in mind, say a slow moody Neil Young number, in mind only to leave the practice with a supercharged Elvis Costello type of song!

Sometimes we’d find ourselves changing the style of a song (our own as well as covers) depending upon the audience we were expecting. We had a lot of fun coming up with unexpected things, like a ska version of Get Off Of My Cloud or a bossa nova rendition of Message In A Bottle. Truth be told, though, sometimes these inspired arrangements were the result of pure boredom, which was, in turn, the result of us playing something the same way over and over and over and over and over again. And, truth be told again, sometimes these experiments with covers led to writing some incredibly wonderful original songs.

Knowing the little nuances of different musical genres can help you in a lot of ways. Perhaps the most important, though not always obvious, thing it can do is to make you flexible. The more styles you can play, the more music you can play. You’d think that this would be a fairly simple thing to understand, but you know the old saying, “Common sense isn’t…”

Today, I’d like to take one song and run it through hoops, if you will – something that, when I first wrote to Dan Lasley about this idea, he laughed and called it my “circle of genres.” Oh, yes, let’s get this out of the way…

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

The song in question is Stand By Me. I don’t know if you’re more familiar with the Ben E. King version or John Lennon’s remake on his Rock And Roll album, but it really doesn’t matter. I picked it specifically for the purposes of this column because (a) it’s very easy to play and (b) I imagine that everyone knows it. The thing will be to open your minds to all the interesting things that you might do with this song (better stop me now before I get to the “think of the song as a bit of clay that you are shaping into a new form…” routine!).

As I said, this is an easy song to play; the chord progression is just a simple I – VI – IV – V – I pattern which repeats itself throughout the verses and choruses. I usually play this in the key of G, so let’s look at the first verse and chorus, shall we?

Nothing to it, right? Okay, then, let’s play!

This is a moderate song in 4 / 4 time. The G and the Em are each two measures of four beats (total of eight beats for both chords). This is followed by one measure (four beats) each of C and D before ending on two more measures of G. Then the whole process starts up once again.

Okay, brief side trip: One of the band’s I was in had an immediate upcoming gig when we learned that our lead singer had been confined to bed rest (it’s a long story…). With only two days in which to put together enough material to cover for her absence, we spent our practices thinking of every single easy song we knew, trying them out. When we came up with one that we were happy with, then we quickly tried to see if there was some way to put a different spin on it so that we didn’t sound like we were just throwing things together! Now, if you listen to either of the aforementioned recordings of this song, especially Lennon’s, you will note the heavy emphasis on the offbeat. This made me think that we should try Stand By Me as a reggae song. So we slowed it down marginally and played around with the offbeat a bit (just like I showed you in the I Shot The Sheriff lesson):

Can you hear the different feel of the song even though this is fairly subtle change? Well, one thing that you will find perhaps not so subtle is how changing the rhythm affects your singing. When the beat is altered, even slightly (and especially if you are both playing and singing), you find yourself changing your vocal to fit the style of the new rhythm. It truly can’t be helped. And it is often to the betterment of your arrangement.

It turned out that, while we like the reggae version, we needed something a little faster because we’d found ourselves with too many mid-tempo range songs. So we (naturally) went overboard by playing it in a very fast ska beat. Because we were really speeding along, the easiest way to play it was by strictly doing single upstrokes on the offbeats. Our bassist pretty much laid the foundation for this one by playing on the beat while the rhythm guitar provided the syncopation, like this:

Notice that we played this with barre chords in order to give it a more trebly sound. This is also something that you have to take into consideration when you play different styles.

Along with tempo and chord voicing, another thing to think about is which effect or effects to use. If you wanted to play Stand By Me in a punk or metal or grunge style, you could easily do it with one guitar playing a long sustained power chord while the second guitar played straight eighth notes. Here are two possible arrangements:

The trick here is to let one guitar ring out while the second provides the drive. You could easily let the bass player do this as well by playing in the same tempo as the second guitarist. In these examples, Variation 1 should be very fast. Variation 2 is more of an up-tempo ballad. For both, Guitar One could just as easily play long, slow, ringing arpeggios instead of one sustained chord. I think you’ll find that you can do a lot of interesting things with the interplay of two guitars.

And we could always go the pretty route. Let’s alter the timing a bit, slow it down a lot and play in triplets. But instead of having to write out all those triplets, I simply put us into 12/8 time. Think of it as “one and a two and a three and a four and a…” if it helps (it helps me!). Now play long rolling arpeggios and listen:

Sounds like one of those 1950’s heartbreak songs where the young hero goes off and runs his car off a cliff, doesn’t it? I put the lyrics in this example because sometimes when you change the timing a bit drastically it helps to think about where you’re going to put the melody! There have been occasions when I’ve come up with a great rhythm arrangement and then realized I’d need someone else to sing it!

But suppose you like your pop songs a little more stylish? Let’s add an open high E string to the mix (which will, of course, alter our chords a wee bit), pick it cleanly and throw in a bit of chorus and hey! You’re Andy Summers of the Police:

Playing this with a lot of palm muting (and be sure to read Ryan’s piece on this – Palm Muting) adds a lot of texture to it. One thing that I especially like about this is the Dadd2add4, which is simply your C typical major chord played two frets higher. I also thought that going from the D to Em for a measure before returning to the G added to the Every Breath You Take feel.

Of course, now that you’re picking the song a little more, you might want to try something folky:

Or throw in some fast fills based on sevenths and you’ve got country:

Now I know what you’re thinking. And as a rhythm guitarist, I can’t help but wonder along with you: “What would Keith Richards do?” My guess would be something along these lines:

Shades of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, no? Here I not only throw in a display of my love of harmonics, but I also borrowed a standard blues/rock turnaround (the Bb to C at the end) in order to give us a bit of an “oomph!”

Well, we’ve gotten kind of far from the simple song we started out with, haven’t we? Imagine the fun I’ve had sitting around playing the same thing over and over again and yet never playing it the same way twice. I had originally figured that this would be more than enough examples but I kept coming up with more! And two of them were too interesting to leave out. Here’s a jazzy version:

Okay, “jazz for beginners” perhaps! This is nowhere near as difficult as you might think it is. Give it a try and see.

If you’ve read my recent column on the stylings of Celtic music (A Celtic Air), you’ll know I had a guitar already set up in D modal tuning (DADGAD to those of you ornery people who have acronyms for everything) (that’s OPWHAFE, by the way). So, I figured why not do a Celtic version as well. Remember to put your capo on the fifth fret so that we’re actually in G modal tuning!

Look at that! Without batting an eye, we’ve come up with ten different ways to play the same song. A song, I might add, that in its original form is still pretty cool. Can you do this with every song? Yes, and more. Should you? Well, that’s very much up to you. There will always be those who feel that you should always strive to be a carbon copy as well as those who live to come up with arrangements that are, to put it nicely, challenging.

Sometimes your interpretation of a song will be a reflection of a genre, of the music you’re familiar with, of the music you like to play, of the music you’re experimenting with. But more often than not it will be a reflection of you.

I hope you’ve had fun with this. We’ll definitely be visiting different genres from time to time in both the guitar columns and song lessons, examining the particulars and exploring the similarities and differences that set them apart.

But never let your lack of familiarity keep you from trying something out. One of the best ways to learn a lot about something is to attempt to copy it. To make a great copy, you have to know what makes it work. I think one of the greatest gifts of music is the joy of creation. And that includes re-creation, if you will. Taking something wonderful and making it even more intense, more personal, more whimsical. There is so, so, so, so, so much out there to learn and play that one can only dream to take in the merest fraction of it during one’s lifetime.

So go out there and make some music, okay? Make it yours and then share it with someone and make it all of ours.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or topics you’d like to see covered in future columns. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

“Hi. This is my normal voice.”

“Hi. This is my sarcastic voice.”

Pretty wild, huh? I bring this up, as I said, because I do have this literal side to me. When someone writes to me asking how to achieve a “authentic” blues sound, for example, I am very likely to say get the cheapest beat up acoustic you can get your hands on and forget about any kind of amplification or effects, unless you happen to have a glass slide. This is simply because, to me, “authentic” blues is the sound you hear when you listen to Robert Johnson, not Robert Cray. Now don’t get me wrong, I love what we’ll call, for lack of a better term, “electric blues.” It’s just that I have a hard time willfully ignoring history.

And I bring all this up because today we’re going to discuss Celtic music. You see, if you think about it, traditional Celtic music is way older than the guitar. Really really, way, way older. So when someone is talking about playing Celtic style on the guitar, what exactly is that person talking about? Simply put, one is actually talking about playing the guitar in a way which makes your mind think of things Celtic. The guitar playing reminds you of other instruments that you would associate with Celtic tunes.

Before we get too much further, let’s take the time to dispel a few myths. Misconceptions more than myths, really. Contrary to what you might think, there is no such thing as a “Celtic scale” or “Celtic notes,” any more than there are scales or notes used exclusively by any genre. Think about this. There are only so many notes and so many ways in which they can be played. Nowadays, we pretentiously toss around terms like “blues scales” and the like without realizing that they’ve been around for a long, long time.

Certain scales and modes do, however, evoke various styles of music. A harmonic minor scale sounds Arabic to Western ears, mainly because of the use of the step-and-a-half interval between the sixth and seventh. We associate this with exotic near-eastern sounds. Likewise, a diminished scale sounds jazzy, if for no other reason than the only time we’ve probably heard it in our lives was while listening to jazz.

It’s how notes are played that is important. When we think of Celtic music, we tend to think of pipes (bagpipes or Irish fifes), harps, fiddles and voices. We also think a lot of drones. Drones, as we’ve discussed in past columns (On The Tuning Awry, But Then Again… and Sustained Tones), are a note or notes that are continually played and/or sustained while the rest of the song does what it does.

Think about the instruments we’ve mentioned. Fifes and pipes tend to be played with a lot of trills. Fiddles, having no frets, don’t always sound spot-on as far as tonality. Harps sound very resonant, which makes sense since one is essentially playing what we would call “open strings” on the guitar. And voices cover all this territory and more.

Putting On Your Disguise

Whether we realize it or not, the guitar has a distinct and identifiable sound to us simply because our expectations of its sound are based upon or past dealings with it. But we are suseptable to having those expectations challenged. Think about this. The classical guitar sounds strange to people who have only heard steel string guitars all their lives. Yet because it is tuned the same, it also sounds familiar. Something seemingly small, like playing the guitar with a slide or even using a coin as a pick, can create sounds that we do not normally associate with our instrument.

So you see, it is possible to change your guitar’s “appearance,” if you will. Or to do what Richard Thompson calls “disguising your guitar.” We want the people hearing us play to have Celtic thoughts, to be magically transported to far off Celtic lands. Our music should evoke thoughts and feelings that trigger this in our audience.

The easiest thing that we can do is to provide the droning sounds of the pipes. In Celtic music, drones tend to be in intervals of fifths. So you could play a lot of power chords, which are nothing but fifths, but that, at least to me. still sounds distinctly like a guitar.

If you tune your low E (or sixth) string down one whole step to D (and yes, you should be able to do this simply using your tuner – just set it for “D” when you tune that string as well as your normal D (fourth) string), you have now created the interval of a fifth between your fifth and sixth strings. Drop D tuning is great for creating an instant droning effect. Play your lowest three strings and listen to how they ring out. Now play a full D chord (remembering that you can now play that sixth string!) and hear how much bottom you’ve given your guitar. Very cool, huh?

Now, if I know how to play different forms of the D chord on first three strings, I can come up with all sorts of things. Here’s the first part of the melody from a traditional Scottish tune, “The Campbells Are Coming,” done with a minimum of finger movement:

Further tinkering with your guitar’s tuning can lead to other interesting effects. Since we’re already in drop D, I’m going to also lower the first and second strings down one whole step and get what we call DADGAD, or D modal tuning. Again, you should be able to do this using a conventional tuner. You see, a tuner doesn’t differentiate between octaves (which, when you think about it , is why you can use a guitar tuner on a bass guitar), so as long as you are tuning to notes that are used in standard tuning (E, A, D, G, B, E) you will be okay.

DADGAD tuning provides you with a lot of ringing notes from the open strings (the harp effect) and also the potential for lots of droning notes. Another added bonus you might discover is that it’s easier to bend strings since there isn’t as much tension on them. This provides you with nice vibrato, which helps the guitar to mimic fiddles and voices.

The use of flourishes, such as vibrato (and hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and bends (which you can all read about in Tricks of the Trade) as well), also aids in disguising your guitar and creating an air of Celtic song. These flourishes show up in often show up in musical notation as grace notes:

Simply speaking, a grace note is like an accident. It doesn’t really have a “timing” to it, like other notes do, because you have to get from that note to your “real” note is quickly as humanly possible. We’ll discuss this in more detail in a little bit.

First, though, I’ve taken the liberty of “creating” a Celtic piece for you as an exercise. Yes, I made this up, but please don’t be too impressed. People, especially those who write those guitar books with the CDs in them, do this all the time. One comes up with an “original” song in order to get around copyrights but the “song” (technically speaking, it’s an exercise) always sounds suspiciously like something else. But, like it as not, this is how you learn styles. And this is actually what you do when you play with your friends. Someone knows a song and teaches it to you, but it may not be exactly the way it is on th recording. You pick it up and when you pass it along, the same thing happens.

Anyway, here it is. Give it a try:

Like anything we’ve done, take it slowly. Take it piece by piece, measure by measure if you have to. It starts out with two measures of the drone in order to give you a feel for it and then adds the melody on the first three strings. In measure three, where the melody starts, you see that I begin with a hammer-on the D note on the second string, followed by the D note of the open first string:

This gives the illusion of a “breathing” instrument, like a fife or a voice, which doesn’t always hit the same note accurately. This is a great technique to use in Celtic style playing. Likewise the various slides make you feel that you have to “find” the note instead of it simply being there.

And speaking of slides, let’s get back to that grace note business. We encounter the first of many of them here in measure four:

The way you play this, timing-wise, is to strike the string (finger on the fith fret) and slide up to the seventh fret at the same time. You want the first beat to fall (in this case) on the A note, but the reality is that the G is going to take up the fraction of a breath before you hit the A. This can take some practice but it is well worth it to have yet another wonderful skill to have at your beck and call.

Measure five, the first measure of the second line, contains another interesting effect:

In some Celtic music, it is hard to tell whether an instrument is playing the natural seventh of a scale or a flatted seventh. Often, especially again with a fife or a fiddle, it sounds kind of halfway between. A quick quarter-tone bend on the C note (which is the flatted seventh in a D major scale) provides us with the same tone. Quarter-tone bends are tricky, because you want to bend the string enough so that it is no longer, in this case, a C note but not so much that you end up with a C# (the same note as the fourth fret of this string). This trick is used a lot in lead playing of all genres, but is especially well suited to Celtic style.

The last measure combines both of these techniques:

Can you hear how you hit the D note three consecutive times, yet each time in a different way which provides a singular sound? It’s these types of subtleties that often differentiate one genre from another.

If you’re really interested in this style of playing, I would suggest two things: one, listen to a lot of Celtic music. And I mean old traditional stuff that doesn’t have any guitars as well as the “new” music that does. Hear the sounds, feel the music you are trying to evoke. Two, read all you can. Again, don’t limit your sources strictly to guitar-oriented material. And again, having said that, I would like to strongly recommend something extremely guitar oriented. It’s a “Guitar Listen & Learn” books with CD that is put out by Homespun Tapes (distributed by Hal Leonard) called “Richard Thompson Teaches Traditional Guitar Instrumentals.” There are pieces in there for guitarists of all ranges and you will find Richard Thompson covers a great many of the topics that we have in today’s column. One of the things he says on the CD about the style and the feel with which music is played is what often determines the “kind” of music you get (“…the feel is the music…”), pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject. And, oh yes, you also get to listen to him play which is always a delight.

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 next lesson…

Peace

Essentially, the genre draws on many other styles of music: Classical (mostly Symphonies and Baroque) and Jazz. As well as a touch of Folk. It is marked by these long songs which were usually limited to the amount of space on a side of a vinyl album. Although ELP’s Karn Evil 9 begins on side one and uses all of side two. Also, in many cases, the songs will start in one direction and end with something completely unrelated.

It often involves changes in time signatures and has been marked by some of the greatest musicians in the business: Steve Hackett, Steve Howe, Steve Morse, Andy Summers, Keith Emerson, Patrick Moraz, John Wetton, Tony Levin, Chris Squire, Carl Palmer, Chester Thompson and too many more to mention here.

Beginnings

Back in the 1960’s, everybody was looking for the new style of music. Innovations in instruments, gear and recording techniques were coming in leaps and bounds. New directions were tried with more or less success. Eventually, though, almost every time, the Beatles were the ones who came up with a new sound, showing that they were well ahead of the game. Until 1969, that is.

Prog Rock finds its sources in the latter half of the 60’s. In 1966, the Moody Blues came out with their third album, the first with Justin Hayward (1) and John Lodge, entitled “Days of Future Passed”, the first Pop or Rock album to be recorded in stereo and the first one to make use of a full orchestra. A very memorable album indeed, spawning two of their greatest hits, “Nights in White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon“. “Nights” was a number one hit when it came out. It was re-released in 1971 on a compilation album and it once again climbed to number one. It was also re-released in the 80s after being featured in a film. It once again climbed to the number one spot…

Although this was still pop, it was a pioneer of the genre. In more ways than one.

In the late 60’s, Prog giants were born: Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis. They were all part of this new movement, along with bands like Procul Harem, Tangerine Dream and Van Der Graaf Generator. Though Floyd were doing what was called Psychedelic or “Acid Rock”, Genesis’ first album (From Genesis to Revelation) was an album, although it was a far cry from what other pop bands were doing at the time. Yes’ first try was a great album, but which borrowed a little from everyone and everything.

King Crimson

In 69, an obscure, unsigned band called the Gods (which, in a certain form, eventually became Uriah Heep) were having their regular personnel problems. The guitarist and singer, Greg Lake, left and formed a band with an old school friend by the name of Robert Fripp. To the lineup were added a couple of musicians from Fripp’s former band, Giles, Giles and Fripp: Ian MacDonald on wind instruments and keyboards and Peter Giles on drums.

Fripp figured the band didn’t need two guitarists, so Lake obliged by picking up the bass. They shopped around their demo which was immediately picked up by the Moody Blues who had their own label, Threshold. Furthermore, for the recording of the first album, the Moodies lent them their producer, Tony Visconti.

After the first day of recording, Visconti walked out. He couldn’t make heads or tails of what this band was trying to do. Lake stepped in to the producer’s shoes (2) and the sessions went on.

The final product was called “In the Court of the Crimson King”. The band was named after that song: King Crimson. And it took an unsuspecting world by storm.

It was a major seller everywhere. It was so shockingly different from anything else that was being done at the time. It took other bands, like Yes and Genesis, a couple more albums before they could claim to be in the same league.

Prog Rock was born!

But Crimson faced a lot of problems, mainly in their lineup. These guys had given so much of themselves on this album that it was causing personnel dissensions. While they were touring North America with Keith Emerson and the Nice, who were on their farewell tour, the band decided to split up after the tour.

MacDonald and Giles wanted to go their own way, while Lake and Fripp wanted to improve on what they’d done. Another factor that came into the picture was Keith Emerson who’d gotten to know Lake during the tour.

Lake eventually left and formed the first supergroup (3) of the 1970’s, Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Originally the band was supposed to feature Mitch Mitchell of Jimi Hendrix fame on drums and Hendrix himself was supposed to audition, although he died a couple of weeks before it was to happen.

Crimson continued reappearing through different lineups and still exist today. The only common member being Robert Fripp. Over the years, the band has counted such people as John Wetton, Bill Bruford, Tony Levin, and Adrian Belew (4).

Establishment

In the early seventies, Pink Floyd had refined their style, thanks mostly to David Gilmour. They could now be counted in the Prog family. Yes, with the acquisition of guitarist Steve Howe (who had originally agreed to form a band with Keith Emerson) and keyboardist Rick Wakeman, produced The Yes Album, followed by the glorious Fragile.

Genesis’ second album, Trespass, one of their best, can be considered a Prog album, although in a folkier way and with an innocent roughness to it which gives it all its charm. With the arrival of Steve Hackett on guitar, replacing an ailing Anthony Phillips and Phil Collins on drums (the bands fourth drummer), they refined their style with Nursery Crime.

The genre was so popular that entire record labels were being built around it. Chrysalis was put together specifically for Prog acts. ELP started Manticore and, with this label, discovered the legendary Italian band PFM (Premiata Forneira Marconi). Atlantic concentrated their efforts of Prog. New bands were arising everywhere.

Although the style is typically British, it was picked up around the world. Bands like Styx and Kansas in the US and Harmonium, Rush and FM in Canada.

Instrumental Works

In 1972, Virgin records was started. The label wished to enter the scene with a bang. Meanwhile, multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield, at 18, was looking for a label who would back up his project of a revolutionary album where he would play no less than twenty-two instruments. Virgin loved the idea and signed him right away. Tubular Bells was released. It did get some success, but it’s only two years later when someone on the set of the film The Exorcist played this to Director William Friedkin that it would get its great push. Friedkin loved the music and thought it would be perfect with his film.

And so did most of the world. Tubular Bells has sold over 20 million copies world-wide. But Oldfield was not the only one to play instrumental Prog. Before him had been Tangerine Dream. Through various lineups, always with Edgar Froese at the helm, TaDream have been through various phases and have experimented with just about everything. And they’re still going strong today.

In 1976, the son of musician Maurice Jarre, famous for his numerous soundtracks, came of with his own brand of synthesizer-driven Prog. Jean Michel Jarre’s first album, Oxygen quickly rose through the charts.

John Williams (not the American guy who did the Jaws and Star Wars soundtracks, rather the Australian Classical guitarist) put together his own band. Williams was the first person to teach Classical guitar in a British college. But he also played for Kate Bush and various other Rock artists. He picked up other musicians such as Francis Monkman (Roxy Music) and put together Sky. Their second album, a double one and the first to be released in North America, mixing Classical and Rock was a huge success. Their version of Bach’s “Toccata” can still be heard today.

What’s interesting about these instrumentalists is that they don’t need to advertise their new albums. The don’t play very much on the radio (not today, that is), yet every release sells millions of copies.

These people, with others such as Vangelis, were the pioneers of another style of music: New Age. Yet their own music, usually found in the New Age section of record stores is, in reality, Progressive Rock. It just sells more if you put them in the New Age sections.

The Family Tree

As bands split-up, members joined other bands. It would be next to impossible to draw a chart of who has played with who (5). John Wetton, for example, has played with King Crimson, UK and Asia, among others. Bill Bruford has played with Yes, King Crimson and UK. Steve Howe has played with Yes and Asia. John Wetton played with Steve Hackett and Ian MacDonald. Hackett has played with Genesis and they had Bill Bruford doing the drums a few times. He also played with GTR with Steve Howe. Ian MacDonald has played with King Crimson. And on and on and on ¼

As this was mostly a complex style of music, it didn’t please everybody. Especially musicians who didn’t have the same talent as the Proggers.

The End of an Era

The style started to lose ground during the late seventies. This was due, mainly, to the arrival of Punk and Disco. Also due to the fact that, as much as these guys had given in the first half of the decade, they couldn’t go on forever. By the 80’s the style was all but dead to the general public.

There were, of course, exceptions. Jethro Tull were still making albums with moderate success. Marillion, a new band at the time, were on the rise. Then came Asia.

In 1982, supergroup Asia, consisting of John Wetton (King Crimson, Uriah Heep, Roxy Music) on bass and vocals, Steve Howe (Yes) on guitar, Geoff Downes (Yes) on keyboards and Carl Palmer (ELP) on drums, took the world by storm. Their first hit, Heat of the Moment has become a classic. Everybody was singing that song. They made so much money they had to spend the next year outside of the UK for tax purposes. At the time, theirs was the biggest selling debut album in history.

The band’s history is rather chaotic. They still exist today, yet only Geoff Downes remains of the original lineup. Then it seemed all was over.

Except that through all of this, Pink Floyd consistently released major albums. They are the greatest exception in the genre.

Offspring

Nevertheless, the style still survived in some form or other. Grunge is a great example. Although it’s a spinoff of what Neil Young was doing, it’s the addition of Prog structures that made the style what it is. Other bands, such as the Smashing Pumpkins who claimed to be “Alternative” were nevertheless nothing but commercial Prog. Everybody loves Tori Amos. And she is extremely talented. But Kate Bush came before her.

Behind the scenes, a lot has been happening. There are bands who have been making careers of Prog while no one was looking. Often referred to as “neo-prog” they are nevertheless in the same leagues as the classic acts.

Independent labels, such as Magna Carta, Galileo, Inside Out and Windstorm, specialize in Prog rock. In fact, there are more Prog acts out today than their were back in the seventies. Bands such as Pendragon, the Flower Kings and Spock’s Beard manage to make a decent living.

Others struggle more, but everyone struggles at some point in every genre. Most struggle all their lives.

The Second Coming

And the genre is selling, all things told, a lot of records. Although concerts are now mostly confined to nightclubs, there are still a lot of them happening. And it’s all more organized today than it was back then.

Tori Amos is huge, as are Radiohead. All the style needs is for artists like these to admit they’re doing Progressive Rock.

With all the attention which is gradually being drawn to it, it is in the process of become a major style again. Sony and other Major labels have started signing Prog acts…

Notes:

1. Hayward had tried to audition for The Animals, but arrived too late. Eric Burden suggested that he try for The Moody Blues.

2. Although the album production is credited to the whole band, it was Lake who actually produced it.

3. A supergroup is a band formed by people who have all been in successful bands or have had successful solo careers. U2 is not, and never will be a supergroup. The Firm were.

4. King Crimson Chart

5. Family Tree Chart

Sometimes I look at these “Easy Songs for Beginners” and I have to wonder if I’m going to get tarred and feathered. Oh, it’s not that they are hard (they aren’t) or that even the theory involved is too difficult (I truly hope it hasn’t been), but I just hope that everyone is having fun with them. And is patient with me. You may have noticed I have this tendency to try to cram a lot into these lessons. It’s not always easy explaining some of the things we’ve covered purely with words and diagrams and I am not always certain I’ve gotten things across in the best possible way. But you can always write me for more details. Ah well, enough digression…

August is musical genres month here at Guitar Noise and I have to admit that my picking this topic was a sneaky way to slip some lessons into the mix. Today’s song is Bob Marley’s I Shot The Sheriff, which will not only serve as a delightful introduction to reggae rhythms, but I’ve also managed to get very sneaky and throw in some transposing as well. Okay, mon, where’s the disclaimer?

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

Before we go on, you might also want to read this little bit on Reggae Style on Guitar. It contains a bit of history on the genre as well as some ideas on rhythm that we will expand upon later.

Step 1 – Chords

Let’s look at the chords and transposition first, shall we? On the CD that I am using (“Legend”), this song is in the key of G minor. How do I know that? Well, if you’ve read some of my past columns, particular the trio on ear training, you’d know that I sat down with my guitar and the CD and played around until I got the chord progression. In terms of song structure, Sheriff can be broken down into two parts: the chorus (the “I shot the sheriff” part) and the intervening verses, which tell the story. There is also a little instrumental riff which separates the two, but we will come back to that later (good lord! More things to learn!!)

The chorus has two alternating chords, Gm and Cm, and goes like this:

The verses have the following chord progression (the number of beats is in parenthesis):

Now I don’t know about you, but this does not at all look like an “Easy Song For Beginners!” But take heart! You have all read my column on transposing called Turning Notes Into Stone (and if you haven’t now’s your chance to sneak out and do so! Don’t worry, we’ll wait right here for you…), so you’re all whizzes at the art of transposing.

Ready to make this a bit easier? Alright, then, since I have no intention of playing this as nothing but barre chords, I have to come up with another key in which to play it. To me, there are two obvious choices – A minor and E minor. As you’ve read, I prefer use a key lower in pitch whenever possible so that, with the aid of my trusty capo, I can still play along with the CD. So I opt for E minor. E is one and a half steps down from G, so all my other chords are going to have to be one and a half steps down as well. Let’s figure it out:

Now that looks a lot easier, doesn’t it? And if I put my capo on the third fret (that’s one and a half steps, remember?), then I am playing in G minor again. So here are the chords we’re going to use:

Let me point out that there are a lot of ways to play the Bm chord (yes, not to mention every chord!). For this song, I prefer to use this voicing and we’ll look at the reasons for this shortly. But first, let’s get our rhythm down.

Step 2 – Rhythm

Having made the chords user-friendly, let’s see what we can do about the rhythm. Like all the things we’ve been doing, we’ll start out fairly simply and then get a bit more complicated as we feel the confidence to do so.

Playing a reggae rhythm guitar involves playing on the offbeat. Just what does that mean? Well, let’s say we have a song in 4 / 4 time (and, thinking about it, I can’t remember ever playing a reggae song that wasn’t in 4 / 4 time), you would count it out like so:

Nothing could be simpler, right? This is how we count the beat of any song, at least any song done in 4 /4 time. But we already know from our past lessons that we can subdivide this into eighth notes or into triplets:

Here you see that we have notes in between the “beats,” between the actual number count if you will. This is the “offbeat.” To get the reggae rhythm, we will strum our guitar only on the offbeat, that is we will strum on the “and” or the “and a” parts of the measure.

And let’s take a moment here to talk about tone. Reggae guitar tends to have a very clipped sound (or “chunky,” as the good book tells us). There are several ways to get this effect. The easiest way is to use an upstroke when you strum. When I play reggae in an all upstroke style on my guitar, I will actually slap my palm on top of the strings after the upstroke. This accentuates the pause that takes place on the beat. When I do use downstrokes, I find I get good control of the tone by resting my palm directly on the strings when I stroke. This is particularly useful in a triplet rhythm.

Upstrokes also bring out the higher strings, or the treble part, of the guitar and most reggae guitar has a nice treble tone to it. This is also another reason I like to use the capo to position my chord voicings higher up on the neck, thus bringing more treble into the chords.

If you’re using an electric guitar, try to keep your tone as clean as possible. Avoid effects such as distortion. Even chorus or echo can really clutter things up a lot, so try to listen carefully to what you’re doing. Reggae should have lots of breathing space.

And don’t think you can’t play reggae on your acoustic guitar. The percussive sounds you can get from strumming an acoustic are wonderful for this style of music.

Before you even get going on the rhythm, take some time to experiment with the sound that you want. You really should do this for any song you work on. The tone you achieve with your guitar, with or without an amp and effects, will be a big factor in how your rhythm sounds.

Okay, having said that, let’s give the rhythm a shot. Let’s start out simply with the eighth notes. Remember to take it as slowly as you need in order to do it right. Once you get the hang of it you’ll be amazed at how fast you can go. All right then, we’ll use the Em chord, one upstroke on each offbeat. Ready?

If you want to see if you’re doing this correctly, try counting the beat aloud while you strum. Seriously. When you count the beat (just the “one, two, three, four” – don’t say the “ands”) you shouldn’t be playing at all when you speak. Once you feel that you’ve got a handle on this, do it again using only downstrokes. Remember to keep them short and clipped. Then mix it up – try both upstrokes and downstrokes. See what you like, where and how you get a sound that you like.

When you feel comfortable play the rhythm in eighth notes, then you can give the triplets a try. There are lots of ways to approach this. Personally, I tend to do a downstroke (D) followed by an immediate upstroke (U), like this:

Okay, you’ve got both of those rhythms down cold, right? Now comes the fun part – mixing them together. Up ’til now we’ve been doing this with only one chord but you’ll see that these exercises will get you going on changing chords as well. Again (always), start out as slowly as necessary. Don’t move on to the next line of the exercise until you feel that you’ve mastered the one you’re on:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

That’s a lot of fun, isn’t it? That last exercise pattern, by the way, is the pattern I usually use to play I Shot The Sheriff. Okay, one more step to go and we’re ready!

Step 3 – Bass and Fill

You’re actually ready to go on and play the song right now if you’d like. The purpose of this section is to give you some added pizzazz should you want some.

If you’re playing solo, reggae can be very disorienting. There is no bass to root your rhythm. But in learning to play the way we have, you can see that are spaces in which to fill in the bass. Do you see them? The rests that we don’t play provide a natural place for it. In other words, we will play a bass note on the beat while playing the rhythm on the offbeat. I told you I can be sneaky sometimes…

Using an alternating bassline, as we did in Margaritaville, will work very well in the chorus section of the song:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Now take your time with this. And don’t get frustrated if it takes you a number of attempts to get it right. After all, you’ve just learned how to do the rhythm and I’ll be more than willing to bet that you haven’t even thought about the alternating bassline since we saw it last. If it helps, revert to doing a straight eighth note pattern until you feel you’ve got it down.

The verses are a little trickier, and now you’ll see why I wanted to use this particular voicing of the Bm chord. What we’re actually doing is a “Bm/D.” When you see a chord with a “/” in it, it is normally understood that the actually chord is in front of the “/.” The note behind it is supposed to be your bass note, or the lowest note in the chord. Since we are going from C to Bm to Em, and since the D note is part of the Bm chord, I have decided to do a straight ascending scale from C to E. Then I revert back to an alternating bass pattern on the Em:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

But here’s something interesting – when I do the alternating bassline on the Em, the last voiced bass note is a B which naturally leads us back to the C. Almost as if someone had planned it that way.

Another way of going about playing these rhythms, believe it or not is in fingerstyle. Using your thumb to play the bass parts while employing your three fingers to pluck the first three strings for the accompanying chords gives you a great sound and excellent control over the rhythmic pattern. If you’re into this sort of thing, go back over the last two examples (the chorus and the verses) using this technique. Your thumb will play the bass notes (downturned stems) and use your ring finger (1st (high E) string), middle finger (2nd (B) string) and index finger (3rd (G) finger) to pluck out the chords.

Okay, one last thing. At the end of each verse, there is a riff that is played by pretty much all the instruments in unison. You’ll see that I’ve TABbed it out right after the first verse. Having the guitar with the capo on the third fret certainly helped to make things easier, didn’t'it? Well then, you’re ready to go and play!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little excursion into reggae. Next time out we’re going to learn an old Dylan song. But before you start groaning, let me add that it’s my way of teaching you the basics of slide guitar…

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 next lesson…

Peace

Reasons

There are many reasons to learn different genres. One is to learn the theory behind it and another is to simply learn the genre for musical knowledge. Hey, as the saying goes “knowledge is power”. But how do you learn different genres, and at the same there are for reasons I believe there are many ways to learn different genres.

These are the steps I use to learn about a new genre:

1. Listen to a bit of the music
2. Check a site or ask a friend to teach you about it
3. Learn how to play it
4. Learn the tricks and tips behind it
5. Learn a couple of songs

Many of these work and you can find out other things to do as well. When you learn different music and (maybe) when you travel around someone may ask you “hey can you play such and such” you can play it for him. But just in case you don’t you can write it down and search for it. You don’t have to like all the genres you listen to but at least respect them for what they can teach you. Whenever you learn a new genre don’t say, “I am learning such and such” but instead say “I am absorbing a new form of music.”

As an example, Let’s say you are a beginning guitarist and you hear about the blues. Now you can go out to a music store or some sites and so forth and you find, and I suggest this too, a “best of” type of CD. In this case let’s make it John Lee Hooker and maybe even Muddy Waters. Check a site like this one. Or, if it’s a much more unknown type of genre (that is, it’s unknown to you by its theory and how to play it), then ask some friends who listen and play it all the time. Study everything about the genre, the theory, the history, even the sub-genres (we’ll talk about those later). As for the tricks used behind blues that is a simple thing to answer. It uses some of the most common types of tricks such as bends and slides and the tips they use behind the tricks would be to use them more emotionally. Now going back to the CD’s we got at the music store lets say we decide to learn Boom Boom by John Lee Hooker and Hoochie Coochie Man by Muddy Waters.

What Made (that genre) What?

Well that’s a big question to ask. what genre made what genre. To give a starting point in history the Spanish invented what we consider the modern guitar and so came classical and flamenco. But if you’re asking about what made a lot of the genres we have today, I would have to say I would the blues is the foundation of a lot of the genres we know. Blues made many forms of music (not all but a lot). So if you ever had to learn a single genre I would go with blues as a good starting point. Blues contains a major amount of the tricks used by today’s guitarists as well as a good deal of theory. But my suggestion is to learn anything and everything you can.

Distinguishing, Variations, Communities

Most genres have branches in which many “sub-genres” are formed by combining different theories. In blues there are forms of “sub-genres”, in this case country blues or folk blues, acoustic blues, Chicago blues, Delta blues, Texas blues, etc. These are all blues but they have different flavors. Taj Mahal is more of a country/folk blues person while guys like

Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker (even though they experimented with different forms of blues) played a form of Delta blues. Jimi Hendrix too was a blues guy but he managed to combine blues with so many different other styles. In making his music, he influenced many others as well.

Tips And Tricks (and other genres to check out)

Look at all the old stuff, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and so forth. And whenever you’re jamming with other guitarists ask them what they listen to and check it out. Also check out who are their role models. To wrap up, the major thing is that in order to be a versatile guitarist you must be stretch you knowledge. Learn as many genres as you can. Then learn to incorporate them into your own style of playing.

First, try this experiment. Go out on the street then ask the first ten people you see to name three classical guitarists. Go on, don’t be afraid. Well ladies and gentleman the chances are that none of the people you asked could name three let alone probably one. One can only ask themselves why is the classical guitar in such a state of equivocalness. The reason is that we have alienated ourselves from the masses. Let’s look at it this way: classical music is viewed as stuffy and if you listen to it you will 1) fall asleep or 2) have an uncontrollable desire to wear 500 dollar Polo shirts and walk around with your nose in the air. When was the last time that you went to a rock concert and the guy next to you said “Hey dude, did you hear the new Stepan Rak disk?” Chances are this has never happened to you. This is sad because popular music has taken so much from our genre. However, because of our holier than thou attitude we have failed to borrow from it and therefore have suffered the consequences.

Let’s have a little history lesson. The year is 1530. You are walking through the center of town and you come across a band of musicians. There playing a version of the Folias. Guess what you call it? You don’t call it classical music. You just listen contentedly, then when they’re all done you say nice Folias and keep on walking. The guitarists of bygone eras such as Sanz, Giuliani, Sor, Mertz, Coste, Pujol, Tarrega, Regondi, and Ferranti, were the back street boys of their time. So what happened? What happened was that people changed and we refused to change with them. Priorities in culture shifted. The industrial revolution brought the factory, and a factory needs to be manned, and guess what? We began to have no time for the arts. The arts are no longer viewed as a necessity. What the children are taught is that happiness is found in a 9 to 5 job, a cute little house with a picket fence, two cars in the driveway and a wardrobe consisting of Abercrombie and Fitch ( please do not think I am bashing these companies, because on the contrary I am a big fan of capitalism). What we fail to give our children is an understanding of the inner workings and the esotericism of life, a lesson that only the arts can teach. Music I believe is the most powerful of all the arts. I dare you to sit through a Chopin Nocturne or a Sor Sonata and not feel the hair on the back of your neck stand on end or feel the soul scream for release from the limitations of the physical body (if you do not feel that way about music than chances are you should not be a musician).

So enter Pop culture. With the introduction of industry and the advent of the factory worker, very few had time for learning to master an art (However music was still needed in order to help pass the time). Since every one was working very few were becoming educated on the collegiate level. What this meant that music had to make the shift from appealing to the intellect of a person to appealing to the carnality of an individual. Rock and roll is a prime example of this. Rock is all about sex. Watch Elvis sway his hips to thousands of prepubescent teenage girls, the same way N’Sync does it today. The music is not intelligent. So why is it so popular ? It’s so popular now because it appeals to that they know, and when you are dealing with vastly uneducated people they like what they know, and what they know is sex. After all, sex is one of the strongest impulses in a human being. I am not saying that because you listen to rock music you are stupid. Please do not misunderstand. When I say uneducated I am not referring to one’s level of intelligence but one’s level of awareness. I Love rock music and even play in a band, so please do not be offended. I only mean to raise your level of awareness.

Okay. So what does this mean for you as the classical guitarist? What it means that you need to be in touch with the times in which you live. The 18th and 19th centuries are over. Here’s the second part of our history lesson. Does any one know what Grieg and Mertz and Giuliani and countless other composers based their music on? Yes, you third row…That’s correct. All those guys based their music upon Folk melodies. And what is Britany Spears and Back Street Boys, Mettalica, Kid Rock, Korn and Limp Bizkit? Yes, Folk Music. Now I’m not saying go right know and compose a set of variations on the theme from Creed’s Higher (although that would be kind of cool). What I’m saying is make yourselves more accessible to the masses by learning what they like and try to reflect it in you music. I’m not saying drop your level of performance or compositional quality but just like Beethoven take something good and make it damn good. Learn to appeal to your audience in a way that they can understand. After all they don’t understand music the way you do because if they did they would be on stage as well.

Please think about what I’ve said and please feel free to e-mail me with questions or comments they would make an excellent follow up article.