Welcome to the first installment of the series. In these lessons I will try to get guitar-specific ideas from instruments that don't necessarily have too much in common with the guitar. We'll analyze singers, percussionists, rappers, drum beats, keyboard players and more. There's an amazing amount of great music out there and we should at least try to learn something from it. In every lesson I will put an emphasis on the performance and technical aspects of playing the ideas we learn on the guitar. These lessons are not meant to be quick fixes of licks and tricks, but rather a place to start with your own musical explorations and ear development.

 

The Queen of Soul

For me, nothing is more humbling than listening to an amazing vocalist. While I've devoted much of my life to the guitar, I feel that no matter how good a guitar player is, he'll rarely be able to match the tonal variety, depth and natural flow of a good singer. While many vocalists are educated musicians, singing usually lends itself to a more instinctual approach that makes them sing what they hear internally, unlike other instruments which rely on scales as a melodic map. For this reason I've always been very interested in transcribing vocal lines and melodies, and we'll try to tackle a couple today. While it's impossible to make our guitars sound like Aretha Franklin, it is possible to inject a bit more of a vocal quality to our playing.

Getting to it

I've chosen a song that practically everybody knows: "Respect" (sdsd records 1968), and transcribed an approximation of the vocal melodies of three verses/choruses. The song is built mainly around the blues harmony - I7, IV7, V7. The verses are essentially a variation on a blues turnaround in C which resolves to the I chord for the chorus. This creates a tension buildup on the verses, which releases on the chorus, where the tonic chord is played (C7). Note that the intro (which has the same chords as the choruses) sets-up the tonal center by starting on the I7 chord.

The vocal melody is based mainly on the C Blues scale (1, b3, 4, b5, 5, b7) but adds two essential color-tones: the natural 3rd, and the 6th. Using these notes in your blues playing will give you a more refined, "uptown" sound.

Verse I

	Song
	Guitar

 

 

 

On the first phrase, Aretha sings Eb, C and A which spell F7, but she does this over the G chord. This works since blues tonality is very flexible and a big part of it's sound is playing notes that don't match the harmony perfectly. We'll simply call this phrase a "C blues lick". Notice how on bar 2 note how she goes to A (10th fret) and not to Bb (11th fret) as the C blues-box would suggest . This works because A is the 3rd of F, but it is also a common technique to alter the minor pentatonic scale (1, b3, 4, 5, b7) by replacing the b7 with the natural 6th. This gives us a new scale - 1, b3, 4, 5, 6. You can hear this color in the playing of Robben Ford, BB King, Otis Rush and many other blues players. Note how on bar 3 the phrase ends on D (10th fret), which is the the 5th of G. Remember these phrases work great for your 12 bar blues turnarounds and will really make you sound like you're nailing the harmony of the V7 chord. On bar 4, the phrase tags the Bb (11th fret) rather than the A (10th fret). This is a good technique for creating more variety in your blues solos- use both the 6ths and b7ths and really mix them up. Another cool thing happens on bar 6, where Aretha is singing "for-a-lit-tle-res-pect". What she does is essentially start the phrase ("for") on the b7 of C (Bb), and raise the pitch on every syllable until last one ("pect") hits the root of C (Bar 7, 8th fret). I left out some notes out of the ascension just to make it sound a little more natural on the guitar.

 

Verse II

 

	Song
	Guitar

Here, on bar 1 Aretha sings B natural (12 fret), which is the 3rd of G. Note how this makes the verse start off in a more mellow way the the previous one. This demonstrates how sometimes "wrong" notes (like the Eb on the first verse) sound bluesier. Again remember that whenever the V7 chord comes up in a 12 bar blues you can bend up to it's 3rd, like we did here. I deliberately wrote this lesson in the standard blues-box to make it more accessible, but once you start feeling more comfortable with these phrases, try playing them elsewhere on the neck.

 

 

Verse III

	Song
	Guitar

On verse 3 we see concepts that were discussed before such as playing the 3rd and the 5th of the V chord and alternating between the 6ths and 7ths of the I7 blues scale. Another cool vocal trick is to end phrases with a micro-bend, like we do in bar 4. This doesn't have to be an exact 1/4 step as long as it's considerably less than a 1/2 step. Players like Jeff Beck do this all the time. The phrase in bar 5-6 is one of my favorites.The notes G (13th fret bend), E (11th fret bend) and C (8th fret) are basically just a C major triad (1,3,5) but sound really great with the bluesy bends and position shifts.

Well, that's all for now. Hope you enjoyed yourselves. If you were having trouble with the theory part of this lesson don't stress out. Remember- the most important thing we can learn from vocalist isn't about single licks. It's about trying to play what you want to hear and not just what your fingers want to do. Good luck until next time!

 

© 2003 Dory Lobel