One of the great benefits of playing 7- and 8-string guitars in various tunings is that they continually inspire me to discover cool and unusual chords and voicings. A great example of this is the song Keep Sweet, which I recorded with Spiritbox for 2025’s Tsunami Sea.
For this track, I play a 7-string guitar tuned to drop-A, transposed down a whole step, what’s often referred to as “drop-G” tuning (low to high: G, D, G, C, F, A, D). This is not a tuning I use often, but it turned out to be perfect here.
Figure 1 illustrates the song’s initial, primary riff. This part is not played very fast and is fairly easy to navigate. The tonal center for the song is B minor (concert key of A minor, due to the whole-step-down tuning transposition), and I begin with an unusual B5b6 chord voicing on the 6th, 5th and 4th strings, which requires a finger stretch between the 9th and 5th frets (allow your wrist to rotate as needed).
As shown in Figure 2, The G note sounded on the 4th string serves as the b6 (flatted 6th) above the foundational B5 chord and lends a dissonant and somewhat atonal quality to the chord.
I then shift to a bassline-like riff on the 7th string that includes a whole-step bend from B to C# at the end of bars 1, 3 and 5. At the ends of bars 2 and 4, I play D5 power chords that set up the return to the top of the phrase. After playing bars 1-4, bars 1 and 2 repeat and are then followed by the second ending (bar 5), which culminates with natural harmonics (N.H.) sounded at the 5th fret of the 5th string.
The key to playing this song well is to have clear separation between the dissonant B5b6 chords and the consonant D5 power chords. Additionally, when playing the B octave notes at the 2nd fret on the 7th and 5th strings, you want to keep them separated.
The trickiest part of playing this riff is transitioning smoothly between the D5 chord and the B5b6. This is highlighted in Figure 3. Strive to keep the transitions clean so that each chord will sound sharply defined.
Figure 4 shows the riff I play during the first verse. In bars 1-6, I shift between referencing the chords D5, A5 and B5, starting with full power chord strums and then following with arpeggiated chords and two-note voicings.
In bars 7-9, I outline Bm and A chords with arpeggios and, on beat 3 of bar 10, make brief reference to Asus4, followed by a 5th-fret natural harmonic on the 5th string, ending the phrase with an open low A note.
I like to present “themes” as I structure the guitar parts for a song. In this case, the initial theme is based on the contrast between B5b6 and D5, and the second theme is the balance between B5 and A5. Another theme is the reiterations of the whole-step bends on the 7th string, which serve to tie the riffs together.
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