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The Theme from Joe 90

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How To Play The Theme From Joe 90

Here’s my take on the great Joe 90 theme written by Barry Gray for the 60s TV series. (Hope all this isn’t too baffling for non-Brits: look here for more info on Joe 90, or check out a few episodes on YouTube.) Irrespective of whether you’re familiar with the TV show, this is simply a great piece of twangy, psychedelic 60s music, and lots of fun to play. I’ve written the music out below. The first guitar part is as close as I can get to what’s happening on the original recording, and the second part is made up of single note basslines along with some barre chord rhythm guitar. PDF files: Guitar 1 and Guitar 2

 

 

 

 

 

Soul Man by Steve Cropper

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Not much more to say about this lesson. A masterclass in tasteful, groovy rhythm guitar. This is the kind of playing that will make people want to listen to you, make people want to play with you, get you gigs and earn you money. Not all that widdly soloing and shredding. I’ve transcribed the song below. Because I’m a bit of a nerd, I’ve written out all three choruses because they’re slightly different on the record. It’s your choice whether you want to nail the song exactly as it’s played on the record or if you want to just capture the overall vibe and improvise a bit with the way you approach it. The structure is simple – just listen to the original recording. PDF.

Race With The Devil by Cliff Gallup

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by Cliff Gallup – Part 1: Rhythm Guitar

I only got into the music of rock n roll legend Cliff Gallup relatively recently, but after I learned this track and a couple of others, it was easy to see why his playing is held in such high regard. This song contains many of his most famous licks and, as I say in the video, if you learn it from start to finish you’ll be giving yourself a thorough schooling in the style and techniques of rockabilly guitar. Gallup has been described as one of the first shredders and he was certainly technically a long way ahead of his time. Even for the modern player this song is still quite demanding, and you’ll want to get it together slowly and accurately first if you want to play it with groove and precision at the tempo of the original.

Below is my transcription of the intro and verse part. Cliff Gallup is one of those players of whom there appears to be no video footage, (I couldn’t locate any on You Tube – let me know if you can find anything elsewhere) so I’ve just followed my ears and my instincts as far as the particular fingerings I’ve chosen go. It works well, and feels right to me. Other people might do it a bit differently, and you’re certainly free to experiment with playing notes on other strings or in different positions if you like. I’ve marked the most obvious whammy bar scoops with the little v-type symbol above the tab. The subsequent verses are almost identical to this one. When the key change kicks in, just move everything one fret higher to the key of F. Click here if you want a high-quality PDF you can print off.

Part 2 – 1st Solo

Here’s part 2 in my series of lessons looking at Cliff Gallup’s playing on Race With The Devil. In this video I look at the first guitar solo. It’s a perfectly formed rock ‘n’ roll solo – flashy, memorable and grooving. Below is my best attempt at a transcription – I hope it’s pretty accurate, but it’s definitely no substitute for careful listening to the original. I’ll leave the right-hand picking up to you. Mostly I aim to pick down on the strong beats and up on the off-beats, though sometimes I break this rule and throw in more downstrokes for extra emphasis.  You can download a high-quality PDF of the transcription here.

Part 3: second Solo

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So here we have Gallup’s second dazzling solo from the tune Race With The Devil. And it’s another corker: packed with great rockabilly licks, technical prowess and whammy bar subtleties. We’ve moved up a semi tone to the key of F, and the entire solo is played in the 1st position apart from a momentary sliding excursion up the high E string. Below is my best attempt at a transcription. I think it’s pretty accurate, though there were one or two notes where it was hard to tell if a bend had been achieved with the fingers or by using the bar. Have a close listen yourself and see what you reckon. Download a high-quality PDF of the music here.

Getting The Sound

If you’re a real gear nerd you might like to check out this article I found which goes into the minutiae of Cliff’s equipment. Even if you don’t own the Gretsch Duo-Jet and vintage tube amp that our man used, you should still be able to get close using whatever gear you have. The key elements to the sound are a fairly warm, clean tone and some kind of delay effect. Use a clean, Fender-y sounding amp, with a fairly low gain setting. Dial back the treble if you’ve got a particularly bright sounding guitar. Grab a delay pedal and set it to a single, fairly quick repeat for that classic rock n roll slap-back echo. It helps if you have a guitar with a whammy bar so you can do some of the little glides into notes. In the absence of a Duo-Jet, I’m using my Bigsby-equipped Les Paul which actually works quite well for this song. Usually I’m a stickler for using old-school gear and effects, but for convenience when filming this video I recorded straight into my computer and used Amplitube software (a Fender tweed emulation) to get the guitar tone.

Kid by The Pretenders

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How To Play Kid by The Pretenders/James Honeyman-Scott

Here we have some more amazing playing from James Honeyman-Scott. As I say in the video, this song arguably contains one of the all-time great guitar solos: inventive, melodic and concise. For me, this kind of playing beats the bluesy-noodling approach to soloing nearly every time. And on top of the guitar genius of Honeyman-Scott, we also have a fantastic song with a great lyric (apparently written from the point of view of a prostitute addressing her child). There’s a lot happening on the original recording: layers of electric and acoustic guitar, alternate tunings, half-speed overdubs. I do my best to get to the bottom of how it’s all played in the video, but there are some things that are impossible to be 100% certain about. I decided to write the more complex intro and solo parts out in full, and then give you a basic chord/lyric chart for the rest of the song.

Intro and Solo

I’ve written out these two signature Honeyman-Scott parts out in full. The intro riff is a great, twangy melody based on the notes in the C major scale. The solo is in the key of E and you could think of it as being based around the E major and E major pentatonic scales. If you want to execute  these parts as flawlessly as JH-S himself you’ll need to be super accurate with both your left and right hands. I’ve marked in how I would probably pick these parts, though there are other options you could try too.

Chord/Lyric Chart

This song works really well in a simple acoustic and vocal setting too (which is often said to be the test of a great song). Check out Chrissie Hynde’s unplugged performance below for a great example of how to approach this. [Update: sorry, looks like YouTube have taken down this video, will try and find another one soon.] If you just want to sing the song and strum along this is the way to go. The chord chart below outlines what’s going on. Here and on the original recording Chrissie keeps her part very simple, that way she can leave it to another guitarist or bass player to outline any more complex textures and harmonies.

Kid-Intro-Solo

Kid-Chord-Chart

This Charming Man by Johnny Marr/The Smiths

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I’ve been playing and teaching this song for quite a few years now, but I’ve always had the nagging feeling that I wasn’t getting it quite right. For this lesson I was determined to get to the bottom of things, and so off I set on a geeky, sometimes gruelling, odyssey into the heart of Johnny Marr’s amazing guitar playing.

The first issue to be aware of when we’re talking about This Charming Man is that there are actually three different recordings of the song. The track was first recorded for a John Peel session in September 1983, which is the same version that appears on the Hatful of Hollow compilation album. There were two subsequent studio recordings: the “London” version, which to me sounds a little too “produced” with its heavy reverb and effects, and the more muscular sounding “Manchester” version (in fact recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport) which was released as a single, and appears on some versions of the self-titled Smiths album. The arrangement and the main guitar part differ slightly between the Peel session version and the other two recordings. I’ve based this lesson on the “Manchester” version, which is probably the most well-known recording.

Now that’s cleared up, let’s move on to the actual guitar part. In the past I’ve always assumed that it was played with a capo at the second fret, which was the only way I could get those chiming open string notes to sound correct. It seemed pretty close to me, but just as I was about to film this lesson I thought I’d check out some live Smiths footage just to make sure I was right. Puzzlingly there’s no capo to be seen in any of the old live footage. So the only other possibility was to tune the entire guitar higher. I gave it a try and – voilà – there was that magical sound. I’m not quite sure why (probably some science-y stuff to do with physics and string length) but there’s something about actually tuning your strings up higher which adds a mysterious chime and jangle which a capo doesn’t give you. So if you want to play the song totally authentically you’ll want to tune all your strings up a whole step, so you have (from low to high) F#, B, E, A, C#, F#. (In fact the recording is a bit flat, so the actual pitch is somewhere between F and F#). Disclaimer: I assume no responsibility for any broken strings and/or guitar necks which may result from the use of this tuning. You should be fine on an electric guitar with light-ish strings, but possibly think twice before trying this on your vintage acoustic guitar strung with 15’s. As I explain in the video, I chose to demo the song in standard tuning to keep things simple. The part is exactly as Marr plays it, but it just sounds lower in pitch and doesn’t quite have the same chiming quality.

So we’ve solved the tuning conundrum, now onto the actual playing.When figuring out this particular part, identifying which notes are being played is only half the battle. There’s also the question of which string the note is being played on, and whether a note is fretted or an open string. Part of what makes this guitar part special is its use of open strings to make the notes flow and chime together. With some careful listening I think I managed to get things about 90% correct, but there were still a couple of points where, in a busy mix,  I couldn’t quite hear what was going on. Fortunately, I came across this great video of Johnny Marr playing the song, so I was able to check my version against the way the man himself does it:

He’s playing in standard tuning, but you can see exactly which strings he’s playing on, where he’s playing open strings, what fingering he’s using, and how he’s picking it. Sadly we don’t get to see him playing the chorus of the song. So for this part I found myself scrutinising ancient Top of the Pops footage, freezing the frame whenever there’s a decent shot of Marr’s fingers just to make sure I got the chords played on the right string sets.

Just as I thought I could go no deeper into Johnny Marr geek-dom, I stumbled across this great article by Joe Gore, who’s an all-round guru when it comes to things indie and alternative guitar-related. It confirmed, amongst other things, that Marr does indeed tune his guitar to F# for this song. You can also hear the isolated guitar stems, not just for the main guitar part but also for the other guitar parts, allowing you to hear details that are impossible to hear in the full mix. There are around 15 – yes, 15! – guitar layers in total. Who would have guessed there’s all this stuff going on? Multiple acoustic guitars, backwards tracks , tremolo, knives…Amazing.

So there we have it. My transcription can be found below, updated to correct a couple of minor slips I made in the video. You can download a high-quality PDF here. Now I just need to get to work on the other 14 guitar parts. And look out for a future lesson on how to play your guitar using knives…

Note on left hand fingering. I perhaps should have gone into this in a bit more depth in the video, as it’s really important to finger this piece in a logical way or it’s difficult to play smoothly up to speed. One spot that can cause problems is the transition from bar 8 to 9. For me the best fingering solution is to play the 10th and 11th fret notes in bar 8 with your 2nd and 3rd fingers, then quickly switch to your 1st and 2nd fingers to play the same notes at the start of bar 9.

More Marr?

Why not check out this lesson I’ve done looking at the more acoustic side of Marr’s style: Back to the Old House