Music – Page 14 – David Bradley

Classic Chords #14 Who is Townshend?

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 bendingÂ on that bottom string and then ascending through C-C/B to D-D/C and back to riffing on theÂ 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.

Prevailing Wind – A timeless song

I grew up on the North East coast of England and feel endlessly drawn to the sea although I live, here in Cambridge, almost as far away from any coast as you can get in England. Oh well. It’s always inspirational to see the whitecaps on any visit and to spend time at the shorelines in any kind of weather, although sunny and warm is preferred over freezing cold and tipping down. It’s perhaps the beauty of it, the briskness, the stones and sand, the spindrift, the mindfulness, the timelessness…

A recent trip to the coastal village of Mundesley with Mrs Sciencebase and some friends got the creative juices flowing. We even had a bit of an audience on our first night singing and playing a few songs and Mrs Sb demonstrated her percussive prowess on the tambourine. One of our party, RL, did some beautiful pen and paint sketches in between beers, there was plenty of lively plucking of banjos and guitars, kicking and picking of stones, lots of scenic photos taken, laughs had, beer supped, wine uncorked (both delicious and otherwise), songs sung and some serious discussion too…

This is my musical sketch of the trip. I must confess although we were close to The Poppy Line, we didn’t actually take the train and that’s really just a reference to walk through fields of ripe barley destined for beer, speckled with the occasional coquelicot. I have not added the early morning sounds of wrens, wood pigeon, blackbirds, chaffinches nor any other dawn choristers for the sake of our sanity, but there is the sound of the sea and a telephonic ident in there for the clear of hearing.

You can listen to the track on SoundCloud (128kbps mp3) or on BandCamp (high-quality file to stream or download for free).

For completeness, the lyrics:

Prevailing Wind

Reading between the lines
Sketching the fever of a swollen tide
The endless meaning of a mindful time
Picking up the stones of the smoothest kind

	And then it begins
	Beyond the veil of original sin
	Reaching out to sea
	Carried on a prevailing wind

And so you have your say
That the proof's the truth in its own sweet way
The bluest blue carries you away
Back to where you grow

	And so it begins
	Beyond the pale you take it in 
	Dream of the sea
	and foreign shores on a prevailing wind

You didn't see the signs
Painting a picture of another time
Drawing deeply from a tainted vine
Kicking up the dust on The Poppy Line

	And so it begins
	Beyond an age of original sin
	Setting out to sea
	Carried on a prevailing wind

Classic Chords #13 – Purple Smoke in Japan

Almost every budding axe heroÂ of a certain ageÂ used to play the seminal heavy rock riff that opens “Smoke on the Water”, fromÂ Deep Purple’s 1972 album Machine Head andÂ 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”.

purple-smoke

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.Â 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 intervetedÂ 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.Â 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 theÂ guitarist is using a pick for the intro to thisÂ song and/or playing theÂ root note on the bottom E string. Here’s Steve Morse showing it’s done properly.

Classic Chords #12 – Message in a Bottle

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.

Classic Chords #11 – Brass in Pocket

UPDATE:Â 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 inÂ 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 inÂ 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 aÂ standard interval up.

The scale of A major is A, B, C#, D, E F#, G#, soÂ the (dominant) 7th chord hasÂ 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.Â As with contemporaries The Police, The Pretenders rose inÂ that post-punk, new wave. It was stillÂ 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 lotsÂ of chorus and reverb.

There’s also the confounding fact that Chrissie Hynde was playing rhythm toÂ James Honeyman-Scott’s lead and there’s non-coincident voicings ofÂ theÂ guitarÂ chords. But, the stand out chord is not dissimilar to the RushÂ 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 resonatesÂ and gives the chord progression that nostalgicÂ 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.

Todo list: Fly jets, fix Hubble, sing Drowning Pool

Back in the 90s, John Hetlinger helped fix the Hubble Space Telescope…but now, aged 82, the highlight of all his various careers as fighter pilot, engineer and more, is, apparently, to sing for Simon Cowell on America’s Got Talent. And, what a song choice! Drowning Pool’s “Bodies”. Now, to take his career to the next level, band has invited him to join them on stage for a jam at Chicago’s Open Air Festival in July. Great publicity for the band, Cowell’s TV show and a senioer wannabe rockstar and ex-fighter pilot.

drowning-hetlinger

Before they were famous

A clip from US TV from 1978 reporting on the “Rocky Horror” craze features a young Michael Stipe in drag. Stipe later of R.E.M fame, of course.

Stipe isÂ not the first celebrity to have pre-empted their fame with a media appearance. Others include Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page playing guitar in a skiffle band on a TV show and telling the presenter he wanted to “go into biological research”.

A young David Bowie, at the age of 17 still known as Davey Jones, and then with flowing blonde locks was interviewed by Cliff Michelmore about his long hair and his foundationÂ of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men. Leave it aaht, daahlin’

The best Phil Collins could muster back in the days when he was a drama student was a lovely knitting pattern, although he did play the Artful Dodger in the stage production of Lionel Bart’s Oliver. It’s almost as if these people had put themselves into a position whereafter they might eventually become famous…

phil-collins-knitting-pattern

Classic Chords #10 – Mad Punk

My band C5 rehearsing Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” last night and trying to get that Nile Style guitar part as close as possible to the original song. Basically, the chords are Bm, D, F#m, E, with the usual Chic cleverness of not playing whole chords and doing something neat with the transitions, so there’s a bit off hammering-on and almost certainly some 6ths when it comes to the D and the E chords, and that F#m can toggle between an F#m7 when it feels happy too.

Anyway, it occurred to me that a neat mashup would work between “Get Lucky” and Tears for Fears “Mad World” (made relatively recently famous again by Gary Jules). The verse for that song is in Am, so the sequence is Am, C, G, D…but if we transpose up a tone we get… Bm, D, A, E. Now, I know what you’re thinking that’s not the same as Get Lucky, there’s an A major chord where Daft Punk play an F#m…but…look at the chords Amaj is A, C#, E. F#m is A, C#, F#. Different! But, if we add the 7th to that chord that’s the not E, so F#m7 is A, C#, E, F# or think of it another way (see diagram) F#m7 is basically an Amaj with F# as a bass note. Let’s mash!

Here’s a short clip of me playing “Get Lucky” followed by “Mad World”

Oh, by the way, that background to the chords is a photo of the windfarm off Skegness I took with a big zoom at sunset from the campsite in Stiffkey, North Norfolk, a couple of summers ago. Shout out to Roger and Jo L!

Meanwhile, persuaded my daughter to join me on vocals for a new cover of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”, whichÂ I was working on but couldn’t get asÂ high as Pharell, here it is in all its mixed down mastered funked outÂ technicolour glory on my Imaging Storm sound and vision site.

Idea for a song – Other side of the tracks

UPDATE: 23rd June – Well, I wrote a newÂ song, it started off with some South American loops and I built up a new guitar part on my Tele, added some bass guitar, messed around with various percussion samples and ad libbed a melody with a few lyrics from my lyrics book, just to get a guide vocal in place. I expanded and fine tuned them but it was withÂ thoughts of the followingÂ Italian tale that gave me the title and the allusion: Latin Class.

Back in my late teens,Â I went InterRailing around Europe with a friend having been dumped unceremoniously by a university girlfriend. I got robbed in France, got blind drunk on the train to Belgrade, was kicked awake by mounted police outside AmsterdamÂ station, was almost strip searched on the journey home by customs…

NoneÂ of my adventure,Â compares to the taleÂ I heard of a great railway journey of the past…Chris King of The TrainhackerÂ shared with me a few of his memories of his loves and travels back in the day, I’ve extrapolated his tweets withÂ some poetic embellishment of myÂ own into the background story for what might become a new song, it’s either going to be call “Well chuffed”, “The other side of the tracks” or “Matching collar and cuffs”, haven’t decided yet.

I fell in love with an Italian traffic copÂ inÂ Vatican City…she had long, dark hair, a golden tan, theÂ crispest, whitest uniform, matching collar and cuffs. She was smoking Marlboro Reds when to do so was still the height of fashion and passion. She had a gun and she shouted “Ciao, bella!” to the Vespa girlsÂ as they whizzed aroundÂ her roundabout inÂ their pretty frocks and bobby socks.

I was kooky, I knew it. It was love and I’ve still got the grainy black and white photo from ’88 to prove it. Memories of a boozy haze of raffia-wrapped Chianti bottles mingled withÂ the greenest of olivesÂ and she wrapped me round her little finger and told me to confess my sins. I didn’t talk back, being forte was not my forte,Â but for a few short weeks, I lived la vida loca all the wayÂ downÂ laÂ dolce vita.

I borrowed a friend’s 500 to reach the other side of the sun-scorched tracks, the heat-buckled rails. On the long journey home, I found a long dark hair entangled in the webbing of my rucksack…it made me weep and reminded me of the taste of salted caramel gelati and the smell of two-stroke…

Classic Chords #9 All Right Now

UPDATE: Rich, the lead guitarist in my band, C5, showed me an alternative fingering for the Em9/A in this song, a version he’d been playing since his high school band. Sounds good to me, I reckon Kossof overdubbed with this version of the chord.

“All Right Now” was the big 1970 hit from the blues-rock band Free with one of the most recognisable but easy to fluff guitar riffs of all time. Unfortunately, for the budding axe hero, Paul Kossoff was not playing anything particularly simple on a single guitar in this song by bassist Andy Fraser and singer Paul Rodgers. Ostensibly, it’s just a standard A major chord with a jangly bit of a D(add4). But, the song has been dissected and aficionados know only too well that there are at least two guitars overdubbed, one playing the A major with a fretted A on the sixth string and the other playing an A major with a fretted A and E on the 1st and 2nd strings.

The D(add4) is often played incorrectly as an open (first position) C major chord shape at the third fret, a D(add2), but the fifth string isn’t fretted in that jangly chord at all, there’s an A at the 5th on the sixth string instead of the C note on the fifth string. There’s a nice Youtube tutorial showing what’s really going on in the studio version of “All Right Now”. Of course, if your the band’s only guitarist and you want to cover this song live, you’re going to have to compromise, unless you’ve got a twin-neck and two left and two right hands.

That “jangly” D(add4) chord is, funnily enough, a substitue for an A7 that is taken up a kind of non-scale in various blues-rock songs, the break in Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” for instance, and in the main riff of Rush’s “Beneath, Between and Behind” (which inevitably sounds very like the former) and no doubt others. Have a listen to Heartbreaker from 2’51” and the opening of BB&B to hear what I mean, same riff basically, you have to agree.

I’ve now recorded myself playing the riff twice in both formats and overdubbed them here: