This is the fourth instalment on the live version of Josh Smith's tune “Triple J Hoedown,” featured on his album, Live at the Spud, recorded at the infamous Baked Potato in Los Angeles. We looked at the section that precedes his guitar solo and features drummer Gary Novak and Josh freely improvising on the groove with no strict adherence to any chord progression. Here, Josh talks about what he plays in the tune’s solo section.
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00:00Hey, Josh Smith here again. We're in our fourth lesson on Triple J Hoedown, my tune from Live
00:10at the Spud. We're up to the solo, where I've built the solo up from the open section into
00:14this 12-bar blues with a 2-5-1 turnaround, and I throw it all at this solo. So I'm going
00:19to play through an entire chorus, and we'll talk about what's going on. So it's basically
00:25a blues. I'm going to play full 12 bars. One, two, three. Anyways, we play two of those
00:54in the song, and of course I'm just making that all up as I go along. But I played a
00:58bunch of stuff in there, and it would be different every night because it's an improvisation.
01:04But basically, I started off with open G stuff. So it went from kind of open stuff to a regular
01:15blues chromatic lick, with a little open string droning happening there. When we got
01:23to the four, I played a cool old blues, country blues thing in C, which is really cool. And
01:38I like to play that a lot, especially when C is not the one chord. When you play a lick
01:42like that over the four, man, it's like this tension is so real that when you resolve,
01:53it's a big moment, you know? Then we got to the 2-5-1, and I played an arpeggio from A
02:04minor to D7, and then back to G. And I played a full chorus of blues like that. Then I do
02:19another one. I ended it, of course, with the blues turnaround. Just because I like to have
02:26something standard at the end for the non-musicians in the audience that they can grab onto. Because
02:31by then, we're getting a little carried away with ourselves. After that, we're back into the
02:36last theme of the song, which is back to the... We play all three themes. And we finally end back
02:49up at the intro. And we rephrase the big lick. We all end with that big downbeat. That's Triple
03:13J hoedown. There's a lot going on in that song. I wrote it a long time ago, and I'm just glad
03:18people like it.