The Sunday Song: Freedom
I put this together today. I think it’s going to end up as the guitar part for a song with lyrics, but I liked it enough as a guitar part that I’m posting it up as just an instrumental. Nothing fancy here — I recorded it with a single mic, did a tiny bit of reverb and EQ, and left it at that.
It’s a capo monster — standard tuning, but capo’d at the second fret, and then again with a partial capo at the 6th fret, covering only strings 3, 4, and 5. I use a Kyser short-cut capo for this. You could use just a single partial capo at the 4th fret to play it a full step lower, of course, which would move it from the key of F# major down to E.
– download Freedom.mp3
Other than that, it’s all in the picking pattern. The trick here is that you finger less than it seems — almost all the chords are only two finger stops. The rising part is actually played in between the two capos.
5 Responses to “The Sunday Song: Freedom”
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Very pretty!
Even if you have capo sickness.
An individual at the Tampa Second Life Jam, who shall remain unnamed, told me that “capo” stands for “can’t actually play open”.
For my part, I’m thinking of putting a capo on my bass just so I can keep up with those guitarists who think F# is the perfect key for everything. I’m just not that hot at transposing on the fly.
Bah, using a capo to transpose has been done for centuries. 🙂 I can play in F# just fine, but there are note clusters in this piece which cannot be played without the partial capo technique (which is actually only a few decades old).
I don’t mind capos at all when I’m trying to play guitar. But in a free-form jam, if I’m on bass and watching the guitarists and trying to figure out what chords they’re playing from the fretting, things get a little strange when one guitarist is capo’d up five and the guy next to him is capo’d up two…
And I’m not exactly the type to stand up and say, “hey guys, I bet this would sound GREAT in G!”
Pick one — say, the two fret guy — and transpose just him! But I must say, saying “key please!” is not uncommon at the jams I attend 🙂