Category: Music

The Police were a post-punk, new wave band, but the power pop trio all had jazz backgrounds. It’s not a surprise then, that they used motifs from that world in their pop songs. ‘Message in a Bottle’ from the band’s second album, 1979’s Regatta de Blanc, could have just been a standard pop tune if it had followed a relatively conventional four-chord progression C#-minor, A-major, B-major, F#minor and then breaking out into an A-D-E.

However, the Sumner/Summers/Copeland combination opted to add the minor-9th note of the scales and arpeggiate the progression across a driving three-note guitar motif ahead of a rocking bassline and the cymbalic skuffling of Copeland’s hi-hats. A similar approach, four chords arpeggiated but with a more steadier, more staid and laid back rhythm and pulse was also used on ‘Every Breath You Take’.

It’s worth noting that Summers plays a harmony part to the main riff, which complicates matters a little if you’re trying to play it solo. There’s a nice video explainer here. With the counter harmony, the chord progression looks a little different: C#m11 – AMaj9#11 – B11 – F#m(add9) (is it actually a G#7sus4?), slide to F#m(add13), all arpeggiated, so not strummed to hear those as full chords. It might be easier to just watch Andy Summers himself playing the riff and the harmony riff here.

Now, I grew up on the Northeast coast of England, although I spent most of the first year of my life on the outskirts of Newcastle in a town called Wallsend, where the aforementioned Gordon ‘Sting’ Sumner would one day be a teacher by day and a jazzman by night before he went on the beat. So, it might be my imagination or some kind of musical synaesthesia but those minor-9ths, the suspended seconds of those chords, give them an atmospheric, ambient but altogether marine quality…or maybe it’s just the song title and the subject matter.

You can hear my cover version of Message in a Bottle here.

More Classic Guitar Chords here.

Meanwhile, nice feature on Summer’s playing during The Police in Guitar Player magazine. They cover MiaB and several others including Every Breath You Take in which Summers sort of recycles those arpeggiated add2/9 chords but with a twist, exercise 7b in that column shows the chords he used but there’s staccato in there so you don’t have to fret the whole chord at once. In fact in Summers’ own videos where he reveals the tricks of his trade, you can see he doesn’t fret the complete chord all at once.

More Classic Guitar Chords here.

UPDATE: I’ve had some Twitter debate with Richard Perkins of Bath Guitar School who half tongue-in-cheek points out that this chord might more formally be called an Aadd9. The note B is second and ninth in the scale of A major and personally, if I’d been playing a C major chord with an added D not on the second string, as in countless songs that go from Dmaj to that version of C to Gmaj, I’d have probably called it a Cadd9.

There is lots of confusion, Aadd2 = Aadd9, but Aadd2 is not Asus2 and nor is Aadd9 A9, novices hoping to expand their chord knowledge need to be aware of this. These types of chords are major triads with an added tone that isn’t a standard interval up.

The scale of A major is A, B, C#, D, E F#, G#, so the (dominant) 7th chord has the flattened 7th note (G) and the 9th chord has the 9th note (B) to be a 9th chord, whereas the Aadd9 lacks the flattened 7th and simply adds the B. One might think of it as the added 2nd rather than the added 9th if that B is closer to the root A rather than being more than an octave higher. But, there is no difference technically speaking, certainly piano players wouldn’t care in the way that we guitarists do.

Brass in pocket…it’s a song about sexual confidence, in case you hadn’t guessed, but also a reference to finding loose change in some dry cleaning. Seriously. As with contemporaries The Police, The Pretenders rose in that post-punk, new wave. It was still about the grit, but there was less spit, and the chords were a lot more mature. There’s lots of palm-muted, double stopped harmonies in here and those big jangly Rickenbacker chords with lots of chorus and reverb.

There’s also the confounding fact that Chrissie Hynde was playing rhythm to James Honeyman-Scott’s lead and there’s non-coincident voicings of the guitar chords. But, the stand out chord is not dissimilar to the Rush Hemispheres Chord but moved up to the A-major at fifth position and with not only the B and high E strings ring open but accompanied by the open A string. Of course, there’s also the suspended fourth (the D) which resonates and gives the chord progression that nostalgic 60s electric 12-string feel. Here’s a very rough attempt at getting half the sound on a single guitar.

More Classic Guitar Chords here.

Ever since I first figured out how to do those funky flicks of the wrist to get the disco guitar sound I’ve attempted to get close to what Nile Rodgers does in terms of those chops; his technique is very different, unique even. Everything from the late 70s Chic and Sister Sledge stuff to Bowie’s Let’s Dance and the Daft Punk reboot of 2012. He, like many of the other greats, comes with a jazz background, so lots of his chords aren’t the usual E-A-D malarkey, but have the minor and major 7ths, 9th, 11ths, 13ths, the sixths, the 7ths with a suspended 4th, the minor7 flat 5s etc etc. There is no classic chord for Nile, there’s the whole Nile Style of The Hitmaker.

Rodgers rarely just chops at all sixth strings at once in that conventional funk motif, he selects out triads from his chords, uses slides (glissando), hammer-ons, lots of left-handed muting and various other techniques to give it that percussive feel and ultimately the sound comes from all of that combined with his vintage Fender Stratocaster.

Here’s a straight strummed E-major7 as an example classic chord of his. It’s got what I think of as a melancholic, evening summer sound, but is simultaneously uplifting and bright, definitely the bipolar world of jazz. And, that’s followed by a little Rodgers’ type riff I ad libbed. You can also hear me doing this kind of stuff, for better or for worse, on some of the funkier tracks on the Dave Bradley BandCamp page.

UPDATE: It doesn’t use Emaj7 like, this but one of my favourite recent Nile songs is, of course, Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”. We’ve performed it at a few live events as a slightly more laid back acoustic, but we’re funking it up with the current incarnation of C5. I recorded a new demo at the weekend and got my daughter to sing the high parts that I simply cannot reach without radical surgery. It’s available in the sciencebase Youtube channel, alhough all you subscribers know that already.

I also videoed myself playing a funking medley of Rodgers’ songs in June 2015