“There's one little lick which annoyed me for a long, long time”: Deep Purple’s Simon McBride on the Ritchie Blackmore lick he found most difficult to learn

When Simon McBride joined Deep Purple in 2022, he was tasked with learning all the band's repertoire, including founding Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore's guitar work. McBride has now revealed which Ritchie Blackmore guitar lick he finds most challenging to play.

“Most of it is actually not too bad. There's one little lick which annoyed me for a long, long time, it's in Lazy,” he says in a new interview with Ultimate Guitar. I don't play the same solo he plays in Lazy, but Lazy is one of those songs where I feel I can just improvise a bit more and just have a bit more fun with it.

“But there's this one lick he does in it, and I said, ‘I have to play that.’ And it's a bitch of a lick. It's not ultrafast. It's just there's a lot of chromatic stuff in it and slides in a very tight space, within three or four frets, and that's it. So that, to me, is the hardest thing about playing Purple.”

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McBride also notes that while Blackmore was never the most technical of guitar players, melody-driven compositions are his forte. “Even Highway Star, the fast part in that, it's fast, but it's not John Petrucci from Dream Theater or something ridiculously fast. It's fast, but it fits the song.

"But everything else that he played was more just melodies. Ritchie played for the song most of the time. But yeah, that lick in Lazy – that still haunts me every night when I come up to it. I'm like, ‘Oh shit, don't screw it up!’”

In a 2022 Guitar World interview, McBride talked about his unique way of learning and tackling ex-guitarist Steve Morse's guitar parts, particularly the unison lines between Morse and Purple keyboardist Don Airey.

“To learn things, I don’t necessarily pick up the guitar for the first two weeks; I’ll just sit and listen to the songs over and over until I’m sick of listening to them. When I actually sit down with the guitar, I like to be able to nearly play it already just from familiarity, knowing the chords and what positions they’re being played in.”

He continued, “I don’t think there’s too much that will be challenging for me. It’s mainly just remembering all the parts as a whole. It’s not like just learning a normal set with standard issue songs, which are verse/chorus/verse/chorus/solo and done. They have all these alternate endings and, as you said, those mad sections with unison lines.”

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Deep Purple recently paid homage to one of their best-known songs, Smoke on the Water, by performing on a stage set up on the lake in Montreux, Switzerland that inspired its lyrics.