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  • 2 days ago
In this Blues Headlines tutorial, we explore the energetic rhythm guitar style of SRV. Follow along as Richard Barrett demonstrates four licks, explaining the picking hand techniques and chordal ideas you can add to your own playing.
Transcript
00:00hi it's richard barrett for guitarist magazine welcoming you to another blues headlines
00:04i'm doing some more rhythmic playing today and we'll have a look at that
00:08and then i'll be back to talk you through it
00:48so
00:49so the player that inspired this more than any other really is steve ray vaughan though i'm not
00:54pitching this as an srv type lesson i do owe him a bit of a debt of gratitude for the
00:59ideas though
01:00so let's have a look at example one there are two things at play in this first example and one
01:06is
01:06the uh not fretting hand the picking hand i'm doing
01:13that kind of bouncy shuffle so with the down stroke i'm playing the slightly muted um chord shapes
01:25i'm muting the d string in the middle because otherwise it gets a bit
01:30it gets a little bit too dissonant it's a matter of taste i'm not saying that that's wrong but i
01:35chose not to do that so each down stroke is a chord and the upstroke is much more just a
01:43rhythmic
01:44hit of the top strings
01:52so you can find those with e a or d chords
02:01i've drawn the chord vocabulary from that and i forgot to say that i've started with
02:08which i think is very easy thing to do but it's a kind of real statement of confidence somehow
02:17it puts me in the right mindset to do that kind of loose groove playing so that's up and down
02:22the e
02:23chords um and then i've finished with
02:31that's the idea and i've really dug in and gone for that
02:36in the way that you will hear srv doing and i just wanted to hear that slight slap back against
02:41the fret and
02:41the brightness that comes from that in example two i've taken a similar approach broadly speaking and
02:48using different types of a chord and i've given myself a full four bars to play with um so is
02:56how
02:56we came out of example one and then i've gone in with an open a string because that's the root
03:02and
03:03that's given me a bit of time to move physically up to the next shape um before i play anything
03:10else
03:10actually i'll point out that the these were played as one continuous take rather than four examples
03:16so the edit points are quite severe but you'll see how it all joins up open a
03:23and that's a d tried but it's over the a bass note
03:30so that's a pretty standard
03:37okay but i've come in with
03:45play it right a little bit of pentatonic linked in there um and then i've gone for another favorite
03:51lick of mine and it's sort of a bit stevie ray vaughness
04:01so you've gone for the same kind of idea where the down stroke is giving you the chord and the
04:06upstroke
04:06is giving you the rhythmic shuffley feel in between
04:14and then i think i'm leading into example three with
04:20so there's an edit point before i get to the b
04:24example three i'm sticking a little bit more with the standard chord shapes and playing less flowery
04:30embellishments
04:35i mean the backing track doesn't actually push so i've gone with pushes over over this which i think
04:41is completely fine everything can't be together all the time you want a bit of syncopation of sorts
04:51i might have gone
04:54still be aware of that kind of detail is what i'm really getting into here rather than
04:58what i specifically played
05:02and then there's another version of b
05:09i think of those as the wind cries mary chords instead of
05:15it's basically inverted so you've still got the triad on the top
05:20and i'll often
05:22it's just a nice embellishment and it's a bit like the caged
05:25it is a caged pattern
05:34okay well the last phrase of this linking into example four it's a little bit thrown away
05:39starts with an upstroke
05:43now by the time i actually hit that low e we are into example four so i'll just play that
05:48again
05:49it really is you know don't be too studied
05:55so it can be messy it can be fluky it can be different every single time i think that that's
06:01a positive aspect rather than it being um the same every single time which could sound a bit too
06:07deliberate and not very funky um okay we're ready for example four this final example is a classic
06:14blues riff really and i'm cycling around the chords ea and b and holding the b ready to kind of
06:20resolve
06:21to turn around back to e and and theoretically start again so i've gone with this unison type sliding up
06:28to
06:28e on the b string
06:34it's between shapes one and two of the e minor pentatonic and i think that again it's more about
06:40knowing what's available to you and improvising within that context so i played something like
06:51i could have played
07:03i think it's important to keep a little bit of spontaneity there as i was saying on the last
07:07example um so having done that run i'm staying pretty much with the b7 chord
07:19and that's the kind of are you looking for trouble blues riff to finish right to speak briefly of tone
07:25i've just gone through the middle pickup here which is a standard vintage output single coil
07:31i did actually have a couple of goes through with the neck and middle because that's what i associate
07:37with srv and i thought that might be nice but i found it wasn't quite strident enough
07:46and then i tried
07:49and in the track it just poked through and it seemed like it was a little bit more pleasing to
07:54the ear
07:55and clearer for everyone to hear so uh the amp is the studios vox ac 15 just set on a
08:03slightly pushed
08:04setting so that can kind of stop it being too spiky gives you a little bit of natural compression and
08:10stain all that stuff so absolutely clean tone would probably be a little bit hard on the ears right
08:17so with all these points in mind let's have another listen to the original sort of solo parts and i
08:24hope
08:24you enjoy it see you next time
08:28so
08:35so
08:41so
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