As an on-the-road project, Sting guitarist Dominic Miller decided to sit down with fourteen of the Beatles' most beloved tunes and write his own solo guitar arrangements, which he eventually compiled into a songbook, The Beatles arranged by Dominic Miller: Guitar Solo Songbook, which he rolled out last year.
“Some people go to museums, or they go hiking and stuff [while on tour],” Miller explains in an interview with Rick Beato.
“I like to sit in my hotel room and just noodle with the guitar. I've been playing a lot of classical pieces forever, and I thought I want to do pieces that are a little bit less academic than that. I want to do tunes that I really like.
“So I chose, for some reason, to attack my favorite Beatles songs and make them for solo guitar in the way that a classical guitarist would do.”
And, according to Miller, the classical music comparison extends to the Beatles' choice of harmonies, which he deems “indestructible.”
“So there's a neighbor of ours about three or four doors down who's probably a piano teacher, and they're teaching this kid to play Bach, but it's the most beautiful thing I could ever hear. So I look forward to that moment when they have their lesson, and I hear Bach played badly with no real tempo, but that's the most beautiful thing that you can hear.
“And I think it's the same for the Beatles,” he asserts. “If someone were to play Michelle or Yesterday badly, the magic would still come through. So that was the biggest discovery for me – how indestructible this harmony is.”
As he sums it up, “Like Bach, I think [the] Beatles [are] one of the only composers that you can play badly, and it still sounds good.”
And Sting’s two cents on the matter? “As Sting has often said, actually – and we talk about this sometimes – is that the Beatles, by doing those songs and coming up with those compositions, they kind of gave a license for everyone else to have a go.
“These guys from Liverpool, if they can do it, everyone should try, and so it opened the floodgates for a lot of songwriters to have an attempt at writing songs, which had never really happened before in England, like pop songs – verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge.”
Last year, Miller revealed that he finds everything in the Police’s catalog “playable” – but pinpointed a song that he says is the band’s most challenging to nail.
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