Guitar 101
BY JIMMY BROWN

Supportive Guitar, part 1
The Muted Single-Note Groove

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Have you ever been in a situation where you were expected to play along with other musicians but you weren’t familiar with the song? Or perhaps you knew the chord changes, but you didn’t want to make the rhythm section sound cluttered or cumbersome by unnecessarily doubling what a keyboard player or another guitarist was playing. What’s an electric guitarist to do in these circumstances? Solo? What if there are vocals happening? Launching into a lead during the middle of a song’s verse or chorus would, in most cases, be considered obnoxious and distasteful, unless you restrain yourself and only play short, simple fills between the singer’s phrases—à la Stevie Ray Vaughan on “Crossfire” (In Step). There is, however, another thing you can sometimes do to contribute to the collective good of the ensemble without stepping on your bandmates’ musical toes, and that is playing the muted single-note groove. This kind of figure is built upon a handful of repeated notes that sound musically agreeable when played behind just about all of the chords in a progression. The key is to find one or more common tones that you can “ride on” for an entire section of a song. Let’s look at a couple of examples of this type of playing.

FIGURE 1 is one of my favorite all-purpose supportive guitar parts in the key of D major. To achieve the desired “chunky” feel, be sure to use alternate (down-up) picking for the 16th notes while muting the strings with the heel of your right palm (this technique is called palm muting and is indicated by the abbreviation “P.M.”) Equally important are the pitchless “ghost notes” (indicated by x’s in the tablature), which are muted with the left hand. To play these ghost notes, simply loosen your grip on the previous fretted note without actually lifting your finger off the string, then pick the string.

As you play this figure, listen to the way the D note (third string/seventh fret) functions as the melodic anchor while the B and A notes (the sixth and fifth relative to D) on the fourth string provide rhythmic and harmonic depth and color. It’s as if you’re beating out a repetitive pattern on a pair of conga drums and embellishing it with subtle accents and well-placed fills. In this case, the pattern is comprised of two two-bar phrases, each nearly identical except for the fills on beat four of the second and fourth bars. Varying the fills like this is a good way to double the musical mileage of a two-bar phrase by extending it into a longer and more interesting four-bar phrase. (If you’ve ever worked with a drum machine, than you’ve probably come to appreciate how much more human and less monotonous a four- or eight-bar loop sounds than a repeated one- or two-bar pattern.)

Figure 1

MP3

This kind of sparse, percussive guitar playing is very effective when there’s another harmonic instrument playing a chord progression or vamp (as in meas. 17 and 18 of this month’s featured transcription of “Fade” by Staind). By picking this type of low-key part instead of strumming or arpeggiating the underlying chords, you’re avoiding musical redundancy; you’re also contributing to the rhythm section in a very worthwhile way by adding a tight, transparent part that makes the groove sound more interesting and beefy while not drawing undue attention to itself. Record producers like Nile Rodgers who work with r&b and pop acts love to use this type of unobtrusive guitar part to “fatten up” a groove while maintaining sonic breathing space.

FIGURE 2 is a supportive muted single-note part that works well over a minor or implied minor tonality (D minor in this case). I’ve added a couple of different accent patterns and fills here to give you an idea of how you can vary your part and keep it “fresh.” Notice the use of unmuted doublestops and sassy quarter-step string bends (both bends are executed by pulling the strings downward). Momentarily letting up on the muting like this really helps make these simple, decorative embellishments “pop out of the mix,” which can provide just the right amount of musical give-and-take with the rest of the band.

Also note in this example how the flatted seventh, C (fourth string/10th fret), functions as the primary melodic antagonist to the root note, D (third string/seventh fret), and helps suggest a minor penatonic tonality. I find that when playing this type of figure it usually sounds more punchy and animated to fret the lower notes on the next lower string from the one the “main” note (the root) is on, as opposed to playing all the notes on the same string. Moving back and forth from one string to another (as in FIGURES 1 and 2) just sounds cooler to my ears.

I also find that these kinds of figures sound best when played on the G and D (or D and A) strings with a slightly overdriven tone with the neck and/or middle pickups on to add some warm midrange color. Having played for many years with a dance-oriented cover band, I’ve long ago come to the conclusion that it’s perfectly fine to add this type of muted single-note part to a song that didn’t feature much, if any, guitar on the recording people are familiar with. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that my band’s versions of club dance songs like Cher’s “Believe” and “Be My Lover” by La Bouche sound pretty slammin’, if not more so than the original recordings, with my percussive single-note guitar parts added. (They seem to make up for the absence of electronic percussion.)

Figure 2

MP3

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour used this type of muted single-note playing to great effect in “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” and “Run Like Hell” on 1979’s The Wall. Other good examples of this same kind of supportive guitar playing in a rock context are the verse figures to Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” (Get Your Wings) and “I’m No Angel” (I’m No Angel) by Greg Allman.

Realize that this kind of feel may not always be appropriate, depending on the style and tempo of the music you’re playing. If it doesn’t sound right, don’t force it! Try something else instead. As a general rule of thumb, 16th notes feel more natural at slow to moderate tempos. If the song is faster than, say, 160 beats per minute, playing 16th notes would probably sound a bit frantic in most cases, so use your judgement to decide what feels right. Even if the tempo is slow enough to play 16th notes comfortably, doing so may sound too “busy” and stylistically out of place, especially if you’re playing a straight-ahead eighth-note punk rock tune or a laid back country love song that is otherwise devoid of any r&b or hip-hop elements.

For good, inspiring examples of this kind of guitar playing, check out rock and roll bands that have successfully incorporated r&b and funk elements into their sound over the years, such as INXS, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and U2. With all the cross-pollination of styles going on in today’s music, this type of playing has also been embraced by hugely successful modern rock bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine and Linkin Park. So keep your mind and ears open, and don’t be afraid to wade into unfamiliar musical waters. See you next month.