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Shot by Both Sides by Magazine

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This is what the album recording sounds like:

And this is the original single version:

It’s interesting to compare the two recordings. I think both of them are great in different ways, so it’s hard to say which I prefer. The single feels like more of a traditional punk recording: raw and to the point, power chords, no keyboards. The version on Real Life is more produced (with John Leckie twiddling the knobs, as he did years later for Magazine-lovers Radiohead on their album The Bends), the guitars are a bit more layered and jangly, and there are interesting keyboard textures from Dave Formula, who I don’t think was a member of the band at the time of the single recording.

I’ve written all the music out below. I’ve just given you the various parts for the different sections – listen to the recording and it should be easy enough to put everything together in the right structure. As I talk about in the video, there are some – mostly minor differences between the guitar parts on the two different recordings. The rhythm guitars on the single are all power chords – so just leave out the top 2 or 3 notes in the barre chords if you want to take this approach. The main riff is played exactly the same on each recording. The solo I’ve written out is the album version though the single version is very similar.

 

 

 

On a side note, I’ve become increasingly irritated with Sibelius, the software that I use to notate all my music. Maybe it’s great if you’re composing a symphony or scoring multiple parts for some complex ensemble but for anything beyond the most basic guitar-based notation it’s a right pain in the arse. Things which should be simple like unison bends or slides into or off of notes require much time-consuming faffing. The key signature is ignored when you’re pasting notes from the tab and you have to go in and manually fix all the notes. And you may as well forget about complex bending stuff like you find in country guitar solos. I’ve only stuck with it as it’s supposedly the most ‘pro’ and sophisticated notation software available. Think I’ll give Guitar Pro another try. [End of rant.]

Spellbound by Siouxsie & The Banshees

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by Siouxsie and the Banshees

Here’s my follow up lesson to Shot by Both Sides: another classic bit of John McGeoch. It took quite a bit of careful listening and study of various live videos to get to the bottom of exactly how this one is played, but I think I’ve more or less cracked it. I’ve written it out below in the form of the various different riffs which make up the song. Just check out the original recording to hear which bit goes where.

 

 

There are a couple of great live performances which are worth watching. I used these to check some of the fingerings and details of exactly how McGeoch does it:

Gear

McGeoch’s sound for this is track is heavily effects-laden – this was the 80s after all. I’m not sure exactly what he would have used on the recording, but I’m guessing it was his main Yamaha SG1000 through a whole ton of processing – chorus and/or flange, reverb, delay, compression…

For this video I plugged straight into my computer for convenience and because I didn’t have all my effects pedals immediately to hand. I used Amplitube for the guitar amp and effects simulation: just a Fender Deluxe amp model, with some chorus, delay and reverb. Then I just played around until it sounded acceptably close to McGeoch’s sound.

McGeoch nerds might be interested in this link, which goes into some detail about exactly what gear he used at various points during his career and includes some great scans of old guitar magazine interviews: http://equipboard.com/pros/john-mcgeoch

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

Terrapin by Syd Barrett

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by Syd Barrett

A lovely, easy to play tune by one of my favourite songwriters. I show you 3 ways to approach it: simple strumming, electric guitar arpeggios, and a cool way of combining the chords and melody at the same time.

In case you don’t already know it, the original recording sounds like this:

And here’s my video lesson:

You might also want to check out this live clip of David Gilmour playing the song, elaborating the basic chords with some nice melody notes:

 Simple Strumming

This approach is based on the acoustic part Syd plays on the original recording. The chords used are mostly 6th string root barre chords, but there’s also an open E, a 5th string root D barre chord, and a nice E7 chord in the ‘C form’. I’ve written out the chords below. Make sure you locate the barre chords at the right fret – I’ve put fret numbers alongside. If we’re going to get nerdy about it, you can’t always hear the low root note of the barre chords on the recording. It could be that Syd mostly fretted his barre chords in the kind of folky fashion where he was just covering the top two strings with his index finger and not barring all the way across. Either way works – it’s up to you. If you need a bit more help with the technique and theory behind barre chords you might like to look at these lessons where I take you through the basics:

All About Barre Chords, Part 1

All About Barre Chords, Part 2

 

I’ve written out a chord/lyric chart to the song below. I thought this was the most straightforward way of writing out this song. It should be quite easy to piece the whole tune together, but you’ll need to watch my video and listen closely to the original to get all the rhythmic details correct.

 

 

You can download a high-quality PDF of the music here.

Arpeggios

Below I’ve written out a verse and B-section’s worth of the overdubbed electric part. It sticks fairly closely to what Syd plays during the first verse and first B-section. I’d suggest using this as a guide and improvising your own part based on the underlying chords.

 

Chords With Added Melody Notes

This is just a question of adding a few melodic ornamentations to the basic chords. Mostly this is done with the pinky, meaning you’ll need to re-finger your barre chords to free the little finger up. Watch the video to see me demonstrate one way of doing this. When I get time I might write out some tab/music for this approach too.

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