Making the Most of Open Strings When Soloing with Andy Aledort
In Deep by Andy Aledort
OPEN WATERS
These last few columns have been dedicated to exploring soloing approaches to the Muddy Waters blues classic, “Rollin’ Stone.” The song is played in the key of E, and, true to the style of acoustic Delta blues, as well as electric Chicago blues, many licks are played within the first few frets and incorporate open strings. Ample evidence of this is heard in the acoustic playing of Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy and Lightning Hopkins, as well as the electric playing of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Freddie King, Magic Sam and many others.
OPEN WATERS
These last few columns have been dedicated to exploring soloing approaches to the Muddy Waters blues classic, “Rollin’ Stone.” The song is played in the key of E, and, true to the style of acoustic Delta blues, as well as electric Chicago blues, many licks are played within the first few frets and incorporate open strings. Ample evidence of this is heard in the acoustic playing of Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy and Lightning Hopkins, as well as the electric playing of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Freddie King, Magic Sam and many others.
Transcript
00:00 Hey, I'm Andy Ollidore.
00:16 In this edition of Indeep, we're going to continue looking at ways to improvise on the
00:20 Muddy Waters Blues Classic, "Rolling Stone".
00:23 This time we're going to talk about incorporating the use of open strings into improvised phrases
00:29 along the lines of what you'll hear, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, Stu Ravon, going back
00:33 to Big Bill Brunze, and Lightnin' Hopkins, Magic Sand, people like that, how they would
00:39 utilize open strings.
00:40 Here we go.
00:43 So more of these open string E type of looks.
00:48 I mean, there's so many of them.
00:52 So a good place to start is...
01:01 So that's just...
01:06 And after the first one, there's a million other things you could do.
01:23 So I went...
01:35 Or you could go...
01:41 So that one is...
01:42 More like Steve Ravon.
01:43 Go to the second fret.
01:44 And then, first fret from the hammer pole.
01:57 Instead of three, two.
02:02 Which is more what Hendrix would do, or Johnny Winter.
02:04 Steve would go...
02:21 So you can really go to town on these things.
02:32 So that one was...
02:35 And then...
02:45 And then, of course...
02:49 This fast run down.
03:02 So that's one way to do that.
03:06 That was with a slide.
03:13 That's another way.
03:17 Another Steve Ravon type of way of doing it.
03:25 [music]
03:27 [music]
03:29 [music]
03:31 [music]
03:33 (upbeat music)