Weekend Transcriptions

Well, finally got the time to sit down with the guitar and transcribe some of the tunes from the new band's songlist.

Obviously "Wild Thing" (The Troggs) and "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (The Stooges) were pretty much no-brainers. "Lola" (The Kinks) wasn't too hard once I'd pulled out a YouTube of the band playing it. I'll admit that I didn't manage to get a good sound from the electric for the strummy bit, though. Sounded much, much better on acoustic.

"Hungry Like The Wolf" (Duran Duran) was surprisingly easy to get some decent licks going with. Let's face it, most of the song relies on the vocalist doing his/her bit.

Of course, it wasn't all playing with the guitar. I did have some other household duties to take care of... such as making sure The Boss was happy...



I actually did spend some time on my WAES Rockschool homework, such as practicing 'rigid pentatonics' with the metronome (which felt good) and learning the notes on the A-string. I don't know why I waited so long to get those down. Pretty much I figured out that the three first dots were C, D and E and that F and G straddled the one on the 9th fret. Bingo. The rest just falls into place. I need to keep reinforcing that by playing chords in E-form, A-form and open, but it's really not hard to learn the notes!

What else? After learning the songs I was 'supposed to' for band, I spent some time with "Sunshine Of Your Love" by Cream. I remember learning the first bit of the intro years ago, but I never bothered with the bit where Eric starts playing barre/power chords rather than single notes. It really isn't difficult and it sounds good when amped up.

Oh, and the other thing that suddenly clicked at the weekend was how you could get a warmer sound and more sustain by rolling off the tone controls. Eric did it. Slash did it. Now I'm doing it...