Category: Classic Chords

Back in the day, I ran a series of Classic Chords for Lifeson, Hendrix, The Manics, Oasis, and many others. I attempted to emulate the various guitars of the artists highlighted so I could demo the chords more authentically. Anyway, with the advent of large language models, such as ChatGPT, there is now the option to utilise their training to find a better way to describe how to get a particular guitar tone.

I asked ChatGPT to explain how I could emulate the guitar tone Alex Lifeson uses on one of my favourite Rush song’s Freewill, from their 1980 album Permanent Waves. That was the first tour on which I saw the band live so it holds a special place for me.

Here’s the specific prompt I used to  get it to describe how I might emulate the tone:

You are to act as an expert in VST plugins for music mixing including Guitar Rig. Analyse the Rush song Freewill and tell me how to set up Guitar Rig to emulate the guitar tone used by the band’s guitarist Alex Lifeson in that song. You should provide all details in terms of amp model I should use, and the amp head, reverb, EQ, chorus, and any other effects.

This is what it came back with:

In “Freewill,” Alex Lifeson’s guitar tone is characterized by a crisp, clean sound with a touch of chorus and reverb. To get started with Guitar Rig, you’ll want to follow these steps:

Remember that tweaking these settings will be necessary to get your tone as close as possible. Alex Lifeson’s tone evolved over the years, so it may also vary slightly from live performances to studio recordings. Use your ears as your best guide and make subtle adjustments until you achieve the desired result.

Some Sciencebase readers reached this page searching for “Alex Lifeson headrush rig”. Headrush is a FX pedalboard brand from inMusic Brands.

 

It’s been a while since I posted anything in my Classic Chords series, a selection of (in)famous guitar chords from the world of rock and pop that stand out from the crowd and seem iconic of the artist that used them whether Rush’s Alex Lifeson, Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour, or this one, a B-minor (add 4) [B-D-F#-E). If it had an A in it you could call it a D6/9 as one chording website does, but I don’t think it does so a Bm(add4) it is or an E7-sus2.

This little box of a chord is archetypal Prince funk featuring in the classic…Kiss.

Here’s how it sounds on my Telecaster. I just want your extra time and your…chord:

More Classic Chords here.

I’ve featured Dave Gilmour’s guitar chords before in the Classic Chords series, specifically, the arpeggiated G-min-13 (Gm13) that opens Shine on You Crazy Diamond, the homage to erstwhile and founding member Syd Barrett who was the one who roped in Gilmour all those years ago. Another iconic song from the band, the one that held The Police off the Xmas Number One slot in the UK as the last dying embers of the punk era that was to “get rid of the rock dinosaurs” faded: “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”.*

It’s classic rock but, it’s funky, it has an awesome bassline, beautiful bluesy guitar solo (that Rich in my band plays sublimely, and because it’s a track about school produced by Bob Ezrin it has a kids’ choir singing, just as he’d done with Alice Cooper’s School’s Out seven years earlier.

Now, ostensibly it’s a D-minor chord at the fifth fret that opens the funk in that song. But, listen carefully and you can hear it’s not always quite a simple D-minor, with its D-A-F, I-III-V triad of the D minor scale. Aside from the out-of-phase phasing of Gilmour’s Black Strat in the “between” pickups position, there’s an extra harmony. Obviously really, it’s a C note on the third string, the G-string. This makes it a D-minor 7th chord: a seventh chord with a minor third, perfect fifth, and minor seventh. Minor seventh chords are everywhere, they add a little extra to any funky riff that would otherwise be the plain or vanilla minor chord, they also lend themselves to substitution and progression so that, for example, the Dm7 easily goes to an F major and you might use either depending on exactly what you want out of your chords. It’s mainly the D-minor, but the 7th note creeps in occasionally.

Incidentally, Gilmour is auctioning off most of his guitar collection to raise money for his Foundation. The auction will include the 12-string on which he wrote Wish You Were Here at EMI Abbey Road Studios, the 1955 Gold-top Les Paul that was used for the solo on Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2), and of course, his famous black Fender Strat, which he bought at Manny’s in New York on his first trip to the States when TWA lost his Fender Telecaster (a 21st birthday present from his parents apparently). There’ll also be the chance to be the first Fender Stratocaster, serial number 0001, which is in Gilmour’s collection.

More Classic Chords here.

Was Ian Dury being facetious about Floyd’s partwork in Reasons to be Cheerful (Part 3), I can well imagine that he wouldn’t have been keen to listen to the other parts or the whole album. But, who knows? Odd though that Chas Jankel and The Blockheads in general were funk driven just as is this Floyd song.

TL:DR – The Good Times chords for the chorus, according to Nile Rodgers himself when he plays it live, are Em7, E7sus4, Em11 at the seventh fret, and A13 at the fifth fret. That Em11 is an A7sus4 at the fifth fret on the original recording. The verses are Em7 and Asus4, A.

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Number 24 in my Classic Chords series was Good Times by Chic; I decided to revisit that lesson with a video version.

Nile Rodgers uses four fairly straightforward chords as the building blocks of the classic dance tune “Good Times” by CHIC and made famous over the last forty years by endless sampling and recycling of the track.

The chords are Em7, E7sus4, Em11, and A13.

Straightforward as they seem, the first three played at the seventh fret and the last one at the fifth fret.

The Nile Style is to pick out clusters of three strings to funk across in his trademark percussive style, he rarely strums all the strings at once, so at any one time, three of the strings are sounding, usually staccato, and three are muted. Much of the sound is down to his right-hand rhythm but also the muting with the left hand lifting off the strings. Nile also throws in a few grace notes and additional tones to those chords, so see them as the basic four and build on them to jazz up the funk. That’s the choruses, he simplifies and drops back for the verses: Em7 and Asus4 roughly speaking.

I’ve recorded myself playing just the four building blocks without embellishment. And, on a Fender Telecaster rather than his signature Strat, sorry about that…

If you enjoyed this Classic Chord, check out the series, which includes the proper chords for Tom Sawyer by Rush, The Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar, Times Like These from Foo Fighters and many more.

TL:DR – The Good Times chords for the chorus, according to Nile Rodgers himself when he plays it live, are Em7, E7sus4, Em11 at the seventh fret, and A13 at the fifth fret. That Em11 is an A7sus4 at the fifth fret on the original recording. The verses are Em7 and Asus4, A.

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My band (C5) are busy rehearsing for upcoming pub gigs and a couple of parties. We often jam on the CHIC song Good Times just because it’s a classic to funk out to. But, a couple of weeks ago we made the decision to arrange it properly and add it to the band’s repertoire. Of course, being an uberfan of Nile Rodgers I wanted to get it just right. I thought I thought I had the four chords he uses…been jamming on them for years.

Simple.

Except it was not so simple.

All the online chords charts and tutorials online have something akin to that progression although they seem to jump from the Em7/E7sus4 to an Asus4 (I had that as a much jazzier and more fitting Dmaj7) and then an A13. In fact, attempting to get closer and closer to the harmonies Nile is playing you can hear that the Em7 and the E7sus4 are correct, as is the A13, but that bridging harmony is off by a note or two. Turns out he’s using an Em11 to get him from the main riff to the resolved chord on the fourth beat (and adding a few grace notes in between). Nile spells it out in detail in the video below, from 6’30”. At least that’s the case when he plays it live.  That Em11 is an A7sus4 at the fifth fret on the original recording. The verses are Em7 and Asus4, A.

In addition, as is well known to CHIC aficionados but not necessarily to some funk guitarists who strum across the width of the fretboard with each stroke or use the three high strings only, Nile rarely does that, he grabs triads with his pick and bounces from the higher notes in chunks to the bass notes, chunking and chopping in sixteenths with lots of left-hand muting and plenty of percussive gaps. It sounds like funk, but it’s jazz, man, jazz…

So, the chord chart should look really like the one you see above. If you’ve not been playing it like that, you’ve not been playing it right. Basically, cycles around all four chords in the choruses, but lays back a lot and shuttles between the Em and the A for the verses.

And, here’s a quick burst on my Tele, demo’d in my home studio:

This song has an almost 40-year history and was one of the first to be sampled and sampled and sampled again from Rapper’s Delight and on and on. No the wonder he calls his guitar The Hitmaker.

Here’s Nile explain how he plays Good Times and a whole bunch of other songs

If you enjoyed this Classic Chord, check out the series, which includes the proper chords for Tom Sawyer by Rush, The Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar, Times Like These from Foo Fighters and many more.

Second mix of my demo, this time with a MIDI track of Nard’s bassline

Tom Sawyer is perhaps the best known Rush song. It was the Canadian power trio’s breakthrough hit in terms of sales and popular appeal and was the opener on their 1981 album Moving Pictures. I remember listening to it on vinyl the day it came out and wondering how on earth I was going to work out what Lifeson was playing in terms of chords.

Lyrically, the song strikes out as the eponymous rebel with words by Rush drummer/lyricist Neil Peart and Pye Dubois who wrote lyrics for fellow Canadian rockers Max Webster. The opening power chords that share Le Studio space with Geddy Lee’s Moog synths and a spaced out backbeat from Peart are not your common or garden no-third power chords as you’d imagine, nor were they anything like the open, up-the-neck chords he’d been using in the previous decade (cf The Hemispheres chord).

If they were standard power chords, it would probably just be a big E-major followed by a D and an A and then jumping down to the C. But, Lifeson, who pleads ignorance of most of the chord names in the video tutorial he recorded for the song in 2007, is playing some interesting variations on the power chord idea. In them, an open top E string rings out in the intro on three of four chord variations that give us the progression.

There is (admittedly) a massive E-major power chord at the seventh fret (although by definition because it’s got the third note of the scale of E major (G#) it’s not really a proper power chord). Open bottom E string leads the riff into the sustained power chord. The second chord is an Asus4 (but with the open top E string to add chorus-like resonance to the E fretted on the B string, that too kicks off with an open E string for the riff. The third chord starts with the open A string instead and sustains an A7sus4, which lifts that almost jazzy-sounding second chord, the As4. And, finally kicking with the bass E string open again we move two frets down from the second chord shape to give us a hybrid chord a Cadd2 (basically a C major chord with the second note of the scale of C major, the D, added, you might also called it a Cadd9).

I remember the chords in the Rush music book I had as a kid, they had it as E, Dsus4, A, and then C. It was wrong…well…it was simplifed if not wrong. Any tab and chord sites that talk of E, D, A and C major power chords as being the chords in Tom Sawyer are just plain wrong too. Some seem to get it half right, but Alex himself shows you exactly what he plays here and that’s how I’m playing it on this snippet:

Elbow are a magnificent band, their proto-musical roots perhaps lie in singer Guy Garvey’s admiration of Genesis-era Peter Gabriel although the early elbow song Newborn was, he told interviewers, modelled on a song from “A Trick of the Tail”, namely Ripples, which was post-Gabriel Genesis. Nevertheless, they continue to write and play enigmatic and evocative music of which the song The Bones of You is a fine example.

Now, the ubiquitous guitar tab sites have all sorts of versions of the chords guitarist Mark Potter is purportedly playing on this song. Weird, twisted things that are almost impossible to move between without a lot of digital contortions and attendant noise. Moreover, none of the versions I saw sounded even remotely like the harmonies Potter is producing with six strings on the album or live.

So, I took a quick look at a clip of the band playing the song with the BBC Orchestra. One thing is immediately obvious, Potter, as many guitarists, is efficient. He’s not contorting, it’s just him shuttling between two simple chord shapes. Of course, it’s in an odd time signature against the main beat, as you often expect with this genre and there are some of the same open strings ringing the same notes in both chords.

The two chords which fill the song are a D6/9 chord and A minor-9, the latter with an added D (there’s an implied F# with the bass and vocal melody, giving an Am6/9. The song implies the D6/9 has an added A implying an E7sus4. However, that’s not the end of it Potter is playing with a capo at fret three, so the above discussion is up three semitones: the main chords are thus F6/9and Cm9, with their attendant passing notes C on top of the F6/9 and an A on the Cm9.

Here’s a quick snippet of me playing the two chords with capo 3, not exactly the rhythm Potter plays on The Bones of You but close enough for a demonstration.

More Classic Chords here.

Strictly speaking this classic chord isn’t a chord at all, it’s an interval, the gap between just two notes rather than at least three different notes played together. The interval in question is often described in Western music as “dissonant” and perhaps because of the beating of the harmonics of the two notes against each other (constructive and destructive interference) it has been various labelled the devil’s interval, or more archaically, diabolus in musica. Moreover, it’s often been banned and at the very least lambasted over the centuries in many different realms of music.

The devil’s interval is two bits of what technically we refer to as a tritone. A jump from a root note, up a whole tone and then up a whole tone again, so F to G, G to A, and finally A to B. The leap from F to B is quite dissonant.

In the right hands, it can add an electric frisson to a piece of music. Think of the intro to the Rush instrumental YYZ from the 1981 Moving Pictures album. The guitar pattern played staccato in 5/4 time oscillates between F# and C (the tritone being F#-G#, G#-A#, A#-C) and represents the Morse Code for YYZ (Toronto Airport’s call sign). Similarly, the Blue Oyster Cult song Workshop of the Telescopes from their eponymous 1972 debut album, uses the devil’s interval A-D#.

Although odd, almost occult, importance has been attached to this interval, fundamentally (pardon the pun), it’s just an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth. Picture the scale of C major:

C  D  E  F  G  A  B  C

First note (the root) is C, the fourth note is F. If you augment or sharpen that you get F#. Similarly, flatten or diminish, the fifth note in the scale, the G and you also get F#. C-D, D-E, E-F# – the tritone. Works the same for any major scale. Of course, there is a natural tritone in the scale of C major, but only one: F-G, G-A, A-B, same for whatever major key. In a harmonic context the tritone sets up a certain feeling, that F# to C in YYZ, is just an arpeggiated fragment of a D dominant seventh chord, a D7 – D-F#-A-C.

Where would rock and blues be without the 7ths (which of course are flat relative to the major scale. Look at CDEFGABC again, 7th note would be a B, but it’s down a semitone, so flat, in the (dominant) 7th. In the chor of C major 7, it stays as a B and has a much softer, almost summery sound, relative to the grittier dominant 7th with its devil’s interval.

Rush use the clash of a tritone in several songs, the intro to Between the Wheels has one with a F#11 chord resolving to an Am (both have a D note in the bass, so they’re more correctly, Dm13 and Am(add4), respectively.

Neither Rush nor BOC were being original in using this interval it had been around music for centuries, stirring passions and summoning the devil. Wikipedia has more details and more examples from musical history. In pop and rock music George Harrison uses tritones on the downbeats of the opening phrases of The Beatles’ songs “The Inner Light”, “Blue Jay Way” and “Within You Without You”, to create musical suspense resolution and of course, the opening riff of that most classic of heavy rock songs, Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze uses the very same interval before leaping into the Hendrix Chord (Classic Chord #3). The opening of Maria, from West Side Story too.

Oh, almost forgot, here’s the interval in action, with me playing a version of the YYZ intro: