Chops: Beginner
Theory: Beginner
Lesson Overview:
• Learn how the song can
become your greatest
guitar teacher.
• Discover the greatness that
is the balance knob.
• Expose the soft white underbelly
of the jazz drummer with
a heavy metal anthem.
I am writing this month’s column while riding in a van to the next gig of my Italian clinic tour. With 20 shows in a row and no days off, the schedule is rigorous, to say the least. But I love playing, and that keeps me happy and healthy. Every show brings musical adventures to me in the form of a different bassist and drummer. These generous musicians have been kind enough to learn a formidable list of songs I send out in advance. I truly enjoy this rebellion against “backing tracks,” and it toughens me up to adapt to different musicians’ idiosyncrasies of style and meter on a daily basis. Mostly, it’s just fun to jam a bunch of tunes with different guys every day.
The message that I bring to the audience is this: The best guitar teacher is learning songs and playing them with a band. In my clinic, I show how each song teaches me something valuable. I think the students learn some good things, but I’m the one who benefits the most because I learned the songs! This month, I want you to benefit too.
So I’m going to give you a homework assignment—a very enjoyable one. I want you to learn the songs I learned for my Italian clinic tour. I guarantee you will come out of the other end of this tunnel with bags of inspiration, ideas, and improved fingers and ears. Here is my set, in order, plus some notes on what I found challenging or interesting.
“The Point of Know Return” by Kansas. There is a repeating arpeggio melody that the violin plays in this song. I was jealous of the violin having all the fun, so I worked out a way to play it on guitar. My hint to you: Sweep picking won’t work. Go for pull-offs, string skipping, and a bit of left-hand stretching. For bonus points try the long violin arpeggio in the bridge.
“Waiting for the Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago” by ZZ Top. Does guitar playing get any more fun than this? I’ve jammed this pair before in countless soundchecks, but I finally sat down and learned it properly to get the details of the riff right. And the details are worth getting. Vibrato, vibrato, vibrato! For a good time, call Billy Gibbons.
“Somebody Stole My Thunder” by Georgie Fame. I’m guessing that you haven’t heard this song yet. For goodness sakes, go pull it up on iTunes or YouTube and get a load of one of the swingingest grooves of 1969. I extended the ending fade out into a guitar-scatting solo to give the guitar fans some extra entertainment.
“Riders on the Storm” by The Doors. Yes, “Riders on the !#$@ing Storm.” I’m pretty sure that 99 percent of the audience did not like this song at all. Did that stop me? Nope. I take a perverse pleasure in giving the shredders what they don’t expect. It’s all in the name of trying to get guitar players to rethink their self-imposed stylistic boundaries. When I was a teenager I never would have dreamed of playing this song. But now I love it. The solo sections are truly challenging for me because it doesn’t sound right to play loud and fast. I have to slow down and quiet down and still keep it interesting with some good notes and phrasing choices. This can be bitter medicine for the heavy metal guitar player, but in the end I feel healthier having taken it.
“Blue Rondo à la Turk” by Dave Brubeck. I’m fortunate to have a wife who has spent years playing piano. On this tune she plays the piano part and I take the saxophone parts. The main melodies are fast enough to be interesting, but slow enough to not cause me to panic. The solo section is a jazzy F blues and it forced me to expand from my I–IV–V comfort zone by adding a IIm chord and a VI7 chord into the progression, as well as some diminished moments. These sounds are familiar to me, but my fingers had no idea where to go, so I had to spend some time cramming new shapes into my head. This was time well spent and the result is that the grimacing specter of jazz gave me one friendly grin before resuming its fearful face. Overall this is a fantastic tune and it makes me wonder if Rush got some of their influence from the odd time signature.
“The Hellion/Electric Eye” by Judas Priest. Oh, rapturous metal! This is the good stuff and the audience responds accordingly. I learned this pair of songs back when I was 16 and it was the first time I had any success with fast alternate picking. It was fantastic to relive the experience while singing the line, “I’m made of metal!” This song also spotlights the soft white underbelly of jazz drummers. My open message to jazz drummers around the world is this: “Yes, you have to learn the accents. You can’t be swishy and improvise your way through this. It’s METAL. Get the accents right!” End of rant.
“Space Truckin’” by Deep Purple. For those of us who grew up in the ’70s, there is one thing that we sorely miss about the ensuing decades: They don’t put balance knobs on stereos anymore. I loved my balance knob. Most of the Beatles’ records, early Van Halen records, and many other bands would pan the instruments hard to one speaker or the other, which made it much easier to sort out the guitar part. Deep Purple’s Machine Head album was mixed like this, and Ritchie Blackmore’s parts are worth looking at through this sonic microscope. My favorite part is how the first two verses have one rhythm pattern, but the third verse opens up with a totally different chicka-chugga, chicka-chugga, chicka-chugga, waaa part. And the guitar solo is easily stretched out into a long, satisfying jam.
“Boom Boom” by the Animals. I’ve always been fascinated by the bass part in this version of the blues classic. I expect it to go up but it goes down. And somehow, that is so much cooler. I love the overall arrangement because it has so many stops and accents. And it’s fun to play a blues shuffle while navigating through the daunting territory of F, which is a key where all the dots (fretboard markers) seem to be in the wrong place.
“Taking Care of Business” by Bachman- Turner Overdrive. Whatever the “classic” in classic rock means, this song has heaps of it. I don’t think there is a cowbell in the original recording, but somehow it doesn’t need one because the whole song is like a giant cowbell groove. I’m not sure if my Italian audience could appreciate the philosophy of the lyrics, but I certainly enjoyed them. On a more serious guitar note, the solos continue to give me a great challenge. The chord changes (C–Bb–F–C) don’t seem dangerous at first glance. The C blues scale (C–Eb–F–Gb–G–Bb) is often “good enough,” but to really navigate through the changes purposefully is beyond my current abilities. I still find myself relying on luck and hope. This progression is a perfect example of how even a simple song can be a fantastic guitar teacher. Someday I will get it right. (This is where you can visualize me gazing upward and shaking my fist at a giant, glowing B.T.O. logo.)
And last, but not least …
“Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf. You can shred through scales all day, but if you want a real challenge, try memorizing these lyrics and then singing them at the same time that you play the alternating rhythms of the guitar riff. It’s a lot of rhythms for a single human being to juggle. But once you get it, man, does it feel great. The solo at the end is a challenge for me. The groove is busy with accents and the tempo is right in between my usual comfort zones. It must have been challenging for the original guitarist as well, because he doesn’t do much other than a few choice volume swells. I wanted to give my guitar clinic audience a rousing finale so I had to find a way to put some ripping guitar solos in there. And again, the song is my teacher. A tempo, a key, and a set of accents give me a whole world of challenges and possibilities to experiment with.
So I will end my column the same way I ended my clinics—by encouraging you to write down a list of 10 songs and start learning them now. You can pick mine or you can pick your own. Learn them all the way through. If you can’t make it all the way through, then toss out the tough ones, save them for later, and replace them with simpler ones. Scour your town for musicians and play the songs you learned with a band. It’s fun and it will improve your playing more than anything.
Learn songs.
Learn songs.
Learn songs.
Onstage, Tommy Emmanuel executes a move that is not from the playbook of his hero, Chet Atkins.
“My biggest decision every day on tour is, ‘What do I want to start with? How do I want to come out of the gate?’” Emmanuel explains to me over a video call. “A good opener has to have everything. It has to be full of surprise, it has to have lots of good ideas, lots of light and shade, and then, hit it again,” he says, illustrating each phrase with his hands and ending with a punch.“You lift off straightaway with the first song, you get airborne, you start reaching, and then it’s time to level out and take people on a journey.”
In May 2023, Emmanuel played two shows at the Sydney Opera House, the best performances from which have been combined on his new release, Live at the Sydney Opera House. The venue’s Concert Hall, which has a capacity of 2,679, is a familiar room for Emmanuel, but I think at this point in his career he wouldn’t bring a setlist if he was playing Wembley Stadium. On the recording, Emmanuel’s mind-blowingly dexterous chops, distinctive attack and flair, and knack for culturally resonant compositions are on full display. His opening song for the shows? An original, “Countrywide,” with a segue into Chet Atkins’ “El Vaquero.”
“When I was going to high school in the ’60s, I heard ‘El Vaquero’ on Chet Atkins’ record, [1964’s My Favorite Guitars],” Emmanuel shares. “And when I wrote ‘Countrywide’ in around ’76 or ’77, I suddenly realized, ‘Ah! It’s a bit like “El Vaquero!”’ So I then worked out ‘El Vaquero’ as a solo piece, because it wasn’t recorded like that [by Atkins originally].
“The co-writer of ‘El Vaquero’ is Wayne Moss, who’s a famous Nashville session guy who played ‘da da da’ [sings the guitar riff from Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’]. And he played on a lot of Chet’s records as a rhythm guy. So once when I played ‘El Vaquero’ live, Wayne Moss came up to me and said, ‘You know, you did my part and Chet’s at the same time. That’s not fair!’” Emmanuel says, laughing.
Atkins is the reason Emmanuel got into performing. His mother had been teaching him rhythm guitar for a couple years when he heard Atkins on the radio and, at 6, was able to immediately mimic his fingerpicking technique. His father recognized Emmanuel’s prodigious talent and got him on the road that year, which kicked off his professional career. He says, “By the time I was 6, I was already sleep-deprived, working too hard, and being forced to be educated. Because all I was interested in was playing music.”
Emmanuel talks about Atkins as if the way he viewed him as a boy hasn’t changed. The title Atkins bestowed upon him, C.G.P. (Certified Guitar Player), appears on Emmanuel’s album covers, in his record label (C.G.P. Sounds), and is inlaid at the 12th fret on his Maton Custom Shop TE Personal signature acoustic. (Atkins named only five guitarists C.G.P.s. The others are John Knowles, Steve Wariner, Jerry Reed, and Atkins himself.) For Emmanuel, even today most roads lead to Atkins.
When I ask Emmanuel about his approach to arranging for solo acoustic guitar, he says, “It was really hit home for me by my hero, Chet Atkins, when I read an interview with him a long time ago and he said, ‘Make your arrangement interesting.’ And I thought, ‘Wow!’ Because I was so keen to be true to the composer and play the song as everyone knows it. But then again, I’m recreating it like everyone else has, and I might as well get in line with the rest of them and jump off the cliff into nowhere. So it struck me: ‘How can I make my arrangements interesting?’ Well, make them full of surprises.”
When Emmanuel was invited to contribute to 2015’s Burt Bacharach: This Guitar’s in Love with You, featuring acoustic-guitar tributes to Bacharach’s classic compositions by various artists, Emmanuel expresses that nobody wanted to take “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” due to its “syrupy” nature. But for Emmanuel, this presented an entertaining challenge.
He explains, “I thought, ‘Okay, how can I reboot “Close to You?’ So even the most jaded listener will say, ‘Holy fuck—I didn’t expect that! Wow, I really like that; that is a good melody!’ So I found a good key to play the song in, which allowed me to get some open notes that sustain while I move the chords. Then what I did is, in every phrase, I made the chord unresolve, then resolve.
Tommy Emmanuel's Gear
“I’m writing music for the film that’s in my head,” Emmanuel says. “So, I don’t think, ‘I’m just the guitar,’ ever.”
Photo by Simone Cecchetti
Guitars
- Three Maton Custom Shop TE Personals, each with an AP5 PRO pickup system
Amps
- Udo Roesner Da Capo 75
Effects
- AER Pocket Tools preamp
Strings & Picks
- Martin TE Signature Phosphor Bronze (.012–.054)
- Martin SP strings
- Ernie Ball Paradigm strings
- D’Andrea Pro Plec 1.5 mm
- Dunlop medium thumbpicks
“And then to really put the nail in the coffin, at the end, ‘Close to you’ [sings melody]. I finished on a major 9 chord which had that note in it, but it wasn’t the key the song was in, which is a typical Stevie Wonder trick. All the tricks I know, the wonderful ideas that I’ve stolen, are from Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, James Taylor, Carole King, Neil Diamond. All of the people who wrote really incredibly great pop songs and R&B music—I stole every idea I could, and I tried to make my little two-and-a -half minutes as interesting and entertaining as possible. Because entertainment equals: Surprise me.”
I share with Emmanuel that the performances on Live at the Sydney Opera House, which include his popular “Beatles Medley,” reminded me of another possible arrangement trick. In Harpo Marx’s autobiography, Harpo Speaks, I preface, Marx writes of a lesson he learned as a performer—to “answer the audience’s questions.” (Emmanuel says he’s a big fan of the book and read it in the early ’70s.) That happened for me while listening to the medley, when, after sampling melodies from “She’s a Woman” and “Please Please Me,” Emmanuel suddenly lands on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
I say, “I’m waiting for something that hits more recognizably to me, and when ‘While My Guitar’ comes in, that’s like answering my question.”
“It’s also Paul and John, Paul and John, George,” Emmanuel replies. “You think, ‘That’s great, that’s great pop music,’ then, ‘Wow! Look at the depth of this.’”
Often Emmanuel’s flights on his acoustic guitar are seemingly superhuman—as well as supremely entertaining.
Photo by Ekaterina Gorbacheva
A trick I like to employ as a writer, I say to Emmanuel, is that when I’m describing something, I’ll provide the reader with just enough context so that they can complete the thought on their own.
“You can do that musically as well,” says Emmanuel. He explains how, in his arrangement of “What a Wonderful World,” he’ll play only the vocal melody. “When people are asking me at a workshop, ‘How come you don’t put chords behind that part?’ I say, ‘I’m drawing the melody and you’re putting in all the background in your head. I don’t need to tell you what the chords are. You already know what the chords are.’”
“Wayne Moss came up to me and said, ‘You know, you did my part and Chet’s at the same time. That’s not fair!’”
Another track featured on Live at the Sydney Opera House is a cover of Paul Simon’s “American Tune” (which Emmanuel then jumps into an adaptation of the Australian bush ballad, “Waltzing Matilda”). It’s been a while since I really spent time with There GoesRhymin’ Simon (on which “American Tune” was first released), and yet it sounded so familiar to me. A little digging revealed that its melody is based on the 17th-century Christian hymn, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” which was arranged and repurposed by Bach in a few of the composer’s works. The cross-chronological and genre-lackadaisical intersections that come up in popular music sometimes is fascinating.
“I think the principle right there,” Emmanuel muses, “is people like Bach and Beethoven and Mozart found the right language to touch the heart of a human being through their ears and through their senses ... that really did something to them deep in their soul. They found a way with the right chords and the right notes, somehow. It could be as primitive as that.
Tommy Emmanuel has been on the road as a performing guitarist for 64 years. Eat your heart out, Bob Dylan.
Photo by Jan Anderson
“It’s like when you’re a young composer and someone tells you, ‘Have a listen to Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,”’ he continues. “‘Listen to how those notes work with those chords.’ And every time you hear it, you go, ‘Why does it touch me like that? Why do I feel this way when I hear those chords—those notes against those chords?’ I say, it’s just human nature. Then you wanna go, ‘How can I do that!’” he concludes with a grin.
“You draw from such a variety of genres in your arrangements,” I posit. “Do you try to lean into the side of converting those songs to solo acoustic guitar, or the side of bridging the genre’s culture to that of your audience?”
“I stole every idea I could, and I tried to make my little two-and-a-half minutes as interesting and entertaining as possible. Because entertainment equals: Surprise me.”
“If I was a method actor,” Emmanuel explains, “what I’m doing is—I’m writing music for the film that’s in my head. So, I don’t think, ‘I’m just the guitar,’ ever. I always think it has to have that kind of orchestral, not grandeur, but … palette to it. Because of the influence of Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, and Elton John, especially—the piano guys—I try to use piano ideas, like putting the third in the low bass a lot, because guitar players don’t necessarily do that. And I try to always do something that makes what I do different.
“I want to be different and recognizable,” he continues. “I remember when people talked about how some players—you just hear one note and you go, ‘Oh, that’s Chet Atkins.’ And it hit me like a train, the reason why a guy like Hank Marvin, the lead guitar player from the Shadows.... I can tell you: He had a tone that I hear in other players now. Everyone copied him—they just don’t know it—including Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, all those people. I got him up to play with me a few times when he moved to Australia, and even playing acoustic, he still had that sound. I don’t know how he did it, but it was him. He invented himself.”
YouTube It
Emmanuel performs his arrangement of “What a Wonderful World,” illustrating how omitting a harmonic backdrop can have a more powerful effect, especially when playing such a well-known melody.
The Rickenbacker 481’s body style was based on the 4001 bass, popularly played by Paul McCartney. Even with that, the guitar was too experimental to reach its full potential.
By the early 1970s, the great interest the lads had sparked in 6- and 12-string Ricks had waned. But thankfully for the company, there was still high demand for yet another Beatles-played instrument: the 4001 bass.
Paul McCartney was gifted a 4001 by Rickenbacker in 1965, which he then used prominently throughout the group’s late-’60s recordings and while leading Wings all through the ’70s. Other rising stars of rock also donned 4000 series models, like Yes’Chris Squire, Pink Floyd’sRoger Waters, the Bee Gees’ Maurice Gibb, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, and more.
And like that, a new star was born.
So, what’s a guitar company to do when its basses are selling better than its guitars? Voilà: The Rickenbacker 480. Introduced in 1972, it took the 4000-series body shape and created a standard 6-string out of it, using a bolt-on neck for the first time in the brand’s history.
The 481’s slanted frets predate the modern multi-scale phenomenon by decades. The eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
“It was like a yo-yo at Rickenbacker sometimes,” factory manager Dick Burke says in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo. “We got quiet in the late ’60s, but when the bass started taking off in the ’70s, we got real busy again, so making a 6-string version of that was logical, I guess.”
The gambit worked, for a time. Sales of the 480 were strong enough at first that, in 1973, a deluxe model was introduced—the 481—and it’s one of these deluxe versions that we’re showcasing here.
“The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.”
Take a close look and you’ll notice that the body shape isn’t the only remarkable feature. The 481 was Rickenbacker’s first production run to feature humbucker pickups. Here, you can see each humbucker’s 12 pole pieces dotting through the chrome cover, a variant casing only available from 1975 to 1976. (Interestingly enough, the pickups had first been developed for the 490, a prototype that never made it to public release, which would’ve allowed players to substitute different pickups by swapping loaded pickguards in and out of the body.)
The new pickups were also treated with novel electronics. The standard 3-way pickup-selector switch is here, but so is a second small switch that reverses the pickups’ phase when engaged.
The inventive minds at Rickenbacker didn’t stop there: The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
Long before the fanned fret phenomenon caught on in the modern, progressive guitar landscape, Rickenbacker had been toying around with the slant-fret concept. Originally available from 1970 forward as a custom order on other models, slant frets were all but standard on the 481 (only a small minority of straight-fret 481s were built).
The 481 was the deluxe version of the 480, which preceded it and marked the first time the company used a bolt-on neck.
Dick Burke, speaking separately to writer Tony Bacon in an interview published on Reverb, only half-recalls the genesis and doesn’t remember them selling particularly well: “Some musicians said that’s the way when you hold the neck in your left hand—your hand is slanted. So, we put the slanted frets in a few guitars. I don’t know how many, maybe a hundred or two—I don’t recall.”
Even proponents of the 481 do not necessarily sing the praises of the slanted fretboard. Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, a 481 superfan, told Rickenbacker Guitars author Martin Kelly, “I don’t just love the 481, it’s part of me.... The 481’s slanted frets have made my fingers crooked for life, but I don’t care, I’ll take that for it’s given me riff after riff after riff."
Initial 480-series sales were promising, but the models never really took off. Though they were built as late as 1984, the slant-fret experiment of the 481 was called off by 1979. And these slanted models have not, in the minds of most players or collectors, become anywhere near as sought-after as the classic 330s and 360s, or, for that matter, the 4001s.
For that reason, 481s—despite their novelty and their lists of firsts for Rickenbacker—can still be found for relatively cheap. Our Vintage Vault pick, which is being sold by the Leicester, England-based Jordan Guitars Ltd, has an asking price of 3,350 British pounds (or about 4,300 U.S. dollars), which is still well under half the going-rate of early 360s, 660s, and other more famous Ricks. Some lucky buyers have even found 481s on Reverb for less than $2,000, which is unheard of for other vintage models.
With its idiosyncratic charms, the 481 remains more within reach than many other guitars of a similar vintage.
Sources: Martin Kelly’s Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, Tony Bacon’s"Interview: Dick Burke on the Creation of the Rickenbacker 12-String | Bacon’s Archive" on Reverb, Reverb Price Guide sales data.
