Category: Classic Chords

For the 20th rock Classic Chord in the series, I thought I’d go for Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones. Now, as you guitarists will mostly likely know, “Keef” (as in Keith Richards) does not play in standard EADGBE tuning, he (usually) plays in open G tuning, (D)GBDGD. The parentheses around his bottom string, because if I remember rightly he takes that string off to give him a more authentic Mississippi Delta sound than he’d get with that rumbling bass note.

Anyway, in open G tuning, the opening chords to Brown Sugar sound so much better than the inefficient way many of us have played it in standard tuning over the years. It kicks off with a C and G chords at the 12th fret. Barre the five strings with the index finger at this fret and rapidly hammer-on as you hit the chord with second and third finger on frets 13 and 14 on the B string and the D string respectively to give the C (which looks like a 12th fret Am7 with the top string muted). A lift off those two fingers takes us back to the G, then you dash down the fret board to do roughly the same thing again at the fifth fret (shuttling C and F major with the same shapes) and then up and down again for a repeat of the whole measure. The second guitar flicks in the pentatonic fill, although you can squeeze that in on your own if you need to.

The second riff is then similar but at the 8th fret (G and D chords) then down to the 5th again. Then full barre of the five strings at fret 1 (A major) and then fret 3 (B major) and on to the 5th with the hammer/pulls as required. Have a listen to my rough-and-ready demo of the intro.

This style of playing open-G tuning and fretting chords without needing to use your pinkie seems to be the foundation of a lot of Keef’s harmonies. Ad lib a few things with these basic chords and you’ll end up stumbling upon several Stones’ riffs, Start me up, for instance.

Ironically though, Brown Sugar is a Mick jagger song written in standard tuning and given the Keef flavour with his open-G tuning, his picking style, his string muting, the bandana, the leathered and weathered skin, and the ubiquitous ciggie to make it all authentic when you see the band playing live. (Been there, done that, didn’t waste money on the tee-shirt, St James Park, Newcastle, 23rd June 1982).

Credits: Brown sugar crystals by Genesis12, lip-bite by Lucy Burrluck

James Taylor has written many classic songs, they’re the archetypal singer-songwriter songs you might say. Wonderful melodies, intriguing lyrics and when you’re listening to the originals, wonderful guitar tone and fingerstyle playing. One of the things you quickly learn in attempting to play and sing these simple-seeming songs is that they’re not at all simple, in fact they’re quite tricksy. Taylor does not always use the standard fingering even on the simple “CAGED” major chords like D and G.

Ring finger at D on the B-string and the F# is usually played with the second finger fretting the E-string at the second fret. Taylor prefers to twist that around, so that his index finger is doing the fretting on the highest string and so he can then use it to bring in bass notes on the lower strings. Presumably to toggle between the D major, a D(addE) and Dsus4, he lifts off the index finger and uses his pinkie to get the G on the high E-string.

Anyway, Fire and Rain…one of the best songs ever written, evocative and autobiographical and particularly poignant in being partly about a friend of Taylor’s Suzanne Schnerr, a childhood friend who committed suicide while he was recording in London. There’s lots of fingerstyle tricks in this. It’s usually played with at capo 3, but for simplicity let’s forget the capo. The intro has some little slides and movements back and forth from a G to an A at the fifth fret and back and then jumps to a D, the open position A, with various hammer-ons, pull-offs and trills an E and then a bass run to the G major.

Well, I say G major, what he does is arpeggiate what you’d think of as a conventional G-major but with the ring finger giving us an extra D note on the second string at the third fret (remember capo free in this key). The pinkie lifts off the G note on the top E-string to give us a G6, but the index finger also jumps off the bass B note on the A-string and comes down on the F# on the top E-string to give us a Gmaj7 (well, actually if you keep that D fretted on the B-string it’s a D9Add4), but if you lift that off to give us a B again, it’s the Gmaj7.

Rather than a simple sample of this issue’s Classic Chord, I’ve got a complete cover of the song I recorded a few months ago and I’ve made a lyric video.

Of course, if you want to watch the great man playing it with his interesting fingerings, feel free.

Fellow C5 band member Andrea had a suggestion for a classic chord, one she’s not found a satisfactory resolution for in “Times Like These” by Foo Fighters. As Andrea points out, there are two versions: the original Rush-influenced album version with the following riff that sounds a lot like a Lifesonesque version of The Cult’s “She sells sanctuary” and a softer, less discordant acoustic/unplugged/laidback version that lends a little bit more to R.E.M.

I had a quick look at videos of Dave Grohl playing both versions just to get a measure of what he’s doing in both settings. The simpler way to play the intro to this song is to fret a conventional D major chord but lift off your (index) finger from the G-string to create what is technically a G major 9 (GM9) and then hammer-on back to the normal note of A on the G-string to give you the Dmaj. So far, so conventional. It’s a nice trick and it’s a nice sound, but it’s not the sophisticated discordancy we’ve all grown to love of the album version of the track.

On the album though that heavy intro is much more discordant and it looks like he’s playing an interesting chord at the fifth fret and shuttling between an open D-string for the root note and hammering-on to the fifth fret on the A string, essentially muting that D-string but keeping the top three strings ringing a note, keeping a Dm13 (D minor 13) as a Dm13 played at the fifth fret with two different slightly different fingerings. I doubt that open D string rings much as the hammering-on to the 5th fret of the A-string is happening.

For those who don’t know, foo fighters is term that was used by Allied pilots in WWII to refer to unidentified objects in the sky.

I recorded an approximation of the riff using the Dm13 and the AM9, thos chords…they’re almost jazz…but then Grohl’s guitar hero Alex Lifeson (more him in the Hemispheres and Limelight classic chords) uses a lot of what you might term jazz chords (as if chords are interested in genre, anyway!) I should do the chords from Rush’s Lakeside Park next given that it’s the 24th of May, a day on which everyone would gather.

The classic Yes track Starship Trooper (from 1971’s The Yes Album) comes in several parts just as any good prog rock and/or classical music should. Parts i-iii  are “Life Seeker,” “Disillusion” and “Wurm.” It is that latter section that is the focus of my latest Classic Chord on Sciencebase.com. The chord carries a wonderful and yet seemingly interminable jam on a mesmering progression -nominally nothing more than a G major to an Eb major to a C major and back again.

It’s not a common progression, but guitarist Steve Howe, is not known for being a common guitarist, there’s more jazz than prog in this. Moreover, Howe doesn’t play any of those three chords how you would expect (he’s definitely not with the CAGED program).

Pictured is the basic shape showing the G major, the root is in the open G string and that stays open throughout, with the A-string muted every time. The moveable root note is the G on the B-string. To get to the EbM you move the whole shape down four frets and another four frets again down to the CM and then back up to the GM position to complete the cycle; the wurm that turned. Here’s a quick snippet recorded with out-of-phase pickups, loads of chorus and tons of flanger…

Long after I wrote this Classic Chord, I took a quick look at Yes’s Steve Howe playing this section of ST live, and he does indeed use this exact chord voicing. Obviously. It wouldn’t sound the same if he didn’t.

More Classic Guitar Chords here.

Perhaps one of the most reviled of busker songs is the 1995 Oasis hit “Wonderwall” from the album  (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? The song is namechecked by Scottish band Travis in their first single “Writing to reach you” when singer Fran Healy asks “what’s a wonderwall, anyway?” Well, if he’d taken notes in Beatlography at school he’d have known that Wonderwall is the title of film director Joe Massot’s 1968 psychedelic debut about a peeping Tom who makes holes in an adjoining wall so he can spy on and take photos of his neighbour Penny Lane…I never said it was a great film, did I?

Anyway, back to today’s classic chord, as with Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven before it Wonderwall is banned in ethical guitar shops for good reason, you really don’t want wannabe axe heroes plodding through the simple chord progression with its added drones on the E and G strings, messing up the rhythm and forgetting the change when they get to the pre-chorus, honestly. Sounds like basically the same chords in that Travis song by the way, different key (Oasis is at capo 2 position, although in the video Noel Gallagher is miming it open). It is a wonderful song though.

Anyway, it kicks off with the Em7 where you’re fretting the high E and B strings at the third fret (rel to capo or nut), so it avoids the open high E string you’d have with a more conventional first position Em7 and it also avoids the heavy open D string and defers the D of the chord to the B string. The progression then sticks with the pinkie and ring finger in place and makes a G, you could see that is basically being the same Em7 but with a G bass note, of course. Then it’s a Dsus4 (with the D string fretted at E for variety), still with those two fingers holding down the E and B strings, and then an A7sus4 (ditto). So, really the progression is a moving bassline with a whining/droning on the higher strings that stays the same until the pre-chorus. I’ll break the guitar shop rule (I don’t live in a guitar shop after all) and play it for you (on a Telecaster, after Dylan) and you can decide whether I’d make an ethical or an amoral busker…there’s a few little elaborations in this version where I open up and close down the Ds4 and the A7s4 as mentioned above.

More Classic Guitar Chords here.

TL:DR – The arpeggiated Gm13 guitar chord from Pink Floyd’s Shine on you crazy diamond.

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I grew up on Pink Floyd…well I say that, not sure anyone who spends their time obsessing over music and guitar chords has ever really grown up.

Either way, as a teen, I used to obsessively listen to Dark Side of the Moon and worry neurotically about that line “then one day you find, ten years have got behind you” and the one about the lunatic on the grass. Well, I was probably pushing 20 last time I played my taped copy of the album lying in the sun in my parents’ garden, lazing on a sunny afternoon with an acoustic guitar and all that.

That lyric has gone round three times since then and I still haven’t heard the starting gun nor shaken off the urge to lie on the grass in the sun. Anyway, I was going to do the Em(7) and A(sus4) chords from “Breathe” from that album, which you can also hear in Elton John’s Rocket Man but shifted up three,

But, I don’t think those chords are quite as iconic as the arpeggiated G minor 13 (Gm13) that takes us from Rick Wright’s keyboard-led opening of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” from the Wish You Were Here album, to the heavier next section. So, that’s the one I’ve focused on.

It’s just four little notes Bb, F, G, E, played as “Syd’s Theme” for obvious reasons. Four little notes that build to a quite astounding musical climax from 3’54” in, starting with their slightly disturbing dissonance, their bell-peeling tension that is only released as the drums and bass beat in at 6/4 time and Gilmour lashes out with the tremulous power chords.

 

The Who’s Pete Townshend was by turns a maestro on the acoustic guitar and a wall-of-sound man on the electric. Stacks of amps and speakers, his windmilling right arm, the leaps and kicks and, of course, the smashing up the guitars and hotel rooms in equal measure, allegedly. On the acoustic there was the high-speed percussive, expansive rhythmic strumming, the big sus4 chords of “Pinball Wizard”. On the louder than loud live rockers like “My Generation” it was power and distortion that mattered. I seem to recall reading the it was Townshend who not only was first to use a stack of 4×12 speaker cabinets, which became the staple of heavy rock from its definition in the late 60s of the increasingly loud British Blues Explosion but also the inventor of the power chord (the hard attack, heavily distorted, long sustained, major triads missing their third not, the 5th chords in other words. But, some would say Link Wray invented the power chord in “Rumble”, but that’s not a power chord to my ear!

One of Townshend’s tricks, when pitting his wits against the massive power of John Entwistle’s pounding and intricate bass licks was to play the part of a more conventional bass guitar line but on his six-string. So, we have the opening of “My Generation”, which nominally just goes from G to F. But in reality he was tuned down a tone and playing the bottom notes of an Amaj shape and then adding the descending bass with the thumb to take him from A to A/G (by pitch it was actually the G to G/F). A similar pattern was used on other songs and by other bands, not least Rush, who were/are massive Who fans (hear the that A to A/G trick in the likes of “Natural Science” from Permanent Waves and elsewhere.

Here’s a snippet of me doing some of that kind of stuff. First playing an actual G to G/F at pitch in standard EADBGe six-string tuning, and then in the same tuning A to A/G with some bending on that bottom string and then ascending through C-C/B to D-D/C and back to riffing on the A chord with the thumbed G note on the sixth string. To be honest the B string doesn’t necessarily come into play.

More Classic Guitar Chords here.

Almost every budding axe hero of a certain age used to play the seminal heavy rock riff that opens “Smoke on the Water”, from Deep Purple’s 1972 album Machine Head and the more exciting live version from Made in Japan. Almost every budding axe hero played it wrong. You can even watch Jack Black playing it wrong in the film “School of Rock”.

For a start, Ritchie Blackmore does not use a pick (plectrum) when playing that riff, but more importantly he doesn’t play the root note of the implicit chords. The fledgling guitarist assume it’s power chords all the way, but it’s not. Blackmore lops off those roots and leaves them to Glover’s pounding bass, which comes in later. Instead, what we have is an interveted G5, the D fretted at the fifth of the A string and a G on the D string, same fret, plucked with thumb and index finger in unison. Set your guitar tone right and you can hear it’s true, but Blackmore has explained all this several times in interviews. You can give a thumbsdown to any tutorial where the guitarist is using a pick for the intro to this song and/or playing the root note on the bottom E string. Here’s Steve Morse showing it’s done properly.