Hello interweb creatures!
Last week I wrote a post about my New Year’s Resolution. I’m going to transcribe a guitar solo every week of this year, and here is number one! I’ve gone for Steve Lukather’s soulful lead work on I Won’t Hold You Back from the album Toto IV. Please check it out! Whether you love or hate what you see below, or if you have any ideas about how I can make these better, please be sure to leave a comment and let me know! Alternatively, why not send me a tweet?
Let’s get to it!
The solo starts at 3:19, and the first four bars go up to 3:28. Here it is:
The first thing we need to do is bend up a full tone from the 13th fret on the B string (C to D), and re-pick the bent note on beat 3. It’s best to use your third finger for this. On the & of beat 4, while still holding the previous bend, use your little finger to play fret 14. Want an example? You can see Steve doing this here. Bar 2 is pretty simple, a whole note on fret 13 B string. Have a listen to the awesome vibrato here, and try to replicate it as best you can. Bars 3 and 4 are pretty much the same thing as the first two, with the two C notes on the final beat leading into the next line.
The next four bars (pictured above) are filled by a diatonic descending scale line. The bit that makes this interesting is the use of bends to match the pith of the note previously played. If we assume that the lick starts on beat 4 of the 4th bar, (see above) then the first note of bar 5 is doing this. This is great for practising the pitching of your bends; a super useful skill for most guitar solos! Note how this lick uses position shifts to stay on the B string, making sure your bends fall under your third finger will help here. Again, try to match the vibrato as best you can with this lick. The only other point of interest is the slide down to nowhere at the end of bar 8.
And repeat…
The main lick of the next 4 bars is a refrain of the first lick of the solo, apart from the extra bend in bar 11. We’re just bending up to pitch twice here, rather than re-picking a bent note. The final note of the line move position down to the 8th fret of the E string, giving a bluesy feel to the next lick.
Again, we’ve seen this before… We have less bending to do this time, but the main melody of the lick is pretty much the same as the second line. There’s a slide at the end of bar 14 which is new, and we bring the solo to it’s climax by jumping the final note up an octave and trowing a big old bend in to add a bit of extra drama.
That was fun!
What an exciting excursion into the world of Toto. I kind of want to do the outro solo to Rosanna now… Maybe later on in the year! I think it’s time for some two-handed tapping this week. I went to see Extreme at the O2 Academy in Bristol in December, and have been wanting to learn a couple of their tunes for ages. Get The Funk Out from the Pornograffitti album sounds like a good venture. Check back on Sunday 14th January to see how I get on!
How did you get on learning this solo? Do you have any suggestions of guitar solos I should transcribe? Or would you like to book a lesson to learn how to play your favourite shredder’s guitar solo? Why not get in touch with me using the contact page and I’ll do my best to help wherever I can.
Big love, and awesome licks.
Ed