Nile Rodgers
During the late 1970s and early ’80s, Nile
Rodgers took the old-school chordal style
that had earned him a spot as house guitarist
at New York’s famed Apollo Theater
and morphed it into the key ingredient of
a dance revolution. The band that was the
vehicle for this revolution was Chic, and it
was the toast of the New York disco/funk
scene. Rodgers pared down his jazz chord
vocabulary in favor of a more R&B-like
approach and refined it to fit within a tight,
badass funk ensemble. Drummer Tony
Thompson and bassist Bernard Edwards
were the band’s muscle, while Rodgers’ less-is-more approach—which favored triads and
dyads (two-note chords)—was the secret
sauce. One of the more intriguing elements
of his style is how he is able to mute unwanted
notes with his fretting hand, while still
using those notes to give his fretted notes a
fatter, more percussive
sound.
That clucky muted sound became the
centerpiece for songs like “Le Freak,”
“Everybody Dance,” and “Good Times,”
and it has also become a standard within
the funk and disco lexicon. His signature
style can also be heard on hit songs by Sister
Sledge (“We Are Family”), David Bowie
(“Let’s Dance,” which also features a solo by
Stevie Ray Vaughan), Diana Ross (“Upside
Down”), and many others. On all of them,
his presence is undeniable.
Rodgers’ gets his tone from a hard-tail
Fender Strat with a late-’50s neck and a ’62
body. His pickup selector is usually set to the
neck position, and it goes into a Neve console,
gets a little compression, and is mixed with a
Fender Super Reverb, Twin Reverb, or Roland
JC-120. The amps add warmth to the direct
sound, while his use of thin strings and thin
picks adds a brightness that punches through
a bass-heavy mix. Onstage, he sometimes uses
a Fender Bassman or a Music Man head with
Sunn cabinets. He’s also been known to use
Peavey Classic 50s.
Although Rodgers’ style had a sleek,
slick, funky economy that pushed so many
commercial hits over the top, he actually
began by learning the George Van Eps style
of jazz guitar, which emphasized playing
inversions on sets of three strings all over
the neck. While hardcore jazz cats might
not approve of how Rodgers put this knowledge
to use, that knowledge was key to his
tough, minimalist style. He went on to
become an A-list producer for some of the
biggest names in the business, but it’s his
sick, groovalicious guitar playing that kept
everyone dancing.