When you see me holding an acoustic guitar, I know what you’re thinking...Satchel! Have you gone country?
Our unbelievably good album, Balls Out, features the song “If You Really, Really Love Me,” for which I performed the rhythm guitar tracks on acoustic and played the solo on electric.
FIGURE 1 shows the verse rhythm part: for every chord in this progression, I include the open top two strings, which fills out the sound of the chords while also widening them harmonically. For example, the first chord is constructed from a fretted B5 power chord shape on the A, D and G strings but also includes the open B and high E strings.
The B string doubles the root note while the high E string adds the fourth, resulting in a Bsus4 chord, or B5add4. For the second chord, I lift my ring finger off the D string and move my index finger from the A string over to the D string’s second fret, while keeping the top three strings the same as the previous chord, with the pinkie still planted on the G string’s fourth fret. Over the A root note, the E notes become the fifth while the B notes become the second, resulting in an Asus2 chord. I then barre my index finger at the second fret on the A and D strings to form a big E5 chord. You will hear voicings very similar to all of these chords in the Rush classic, “Limelight.”
In bars 5 and 6, I move the fretted root-fifth-root shape up three frets to sound D6sus2 and then two more frets to sound a higher E5 voicing, keeping the open top two strings ringing the entire time. For the last three bars of the section, I alternate between Csm7add4, Asus2 and Bsus4, using minimal fret-hand movement from chord to chord.
The song’s brief solo section (see FIGURE 2) modulates down a whole step and is played over the progression A5-G5-D5, and my solo phrases are based on a combination of the A Mixolydian mode (A B C# D E F# G) and the A major pentatonic scale (A B C# E F#). My overall concept here was to create an instrumental countermelody within the song, or a “composition within a composition.” Approaching a solo this way is often much more musically effective than just improvising a bunch of fast licks.
In bar 4, I combine string bends with some fretboard tapping: on beats two and four, I hold a whole-step bend on the high E string and then apply a pick-hand tap. The first time, I tap at the 22nd fret, then pull-off before releasing the bend. The second time, I hold the tap while gradually releasing the bend, then pull-off to sound a high B root note right as the chord changes back to Bsus4 for the beginning of the next verse.
