Today’s Lockdown Lesson is on a particular favourite of mine: Eric Clapton’s solo on Freddy King’s ‘Someday After a While’. Clapton recorded this on his 94 album From the Cradle (which I believe is his best) but the solo in question is a live version taken from a film that Martin Scorsese made - I think you can find the whole concert on YouTube.
Personally I think this is Clapton at his absolute best.
As these Lockdown Lessons are intended to be short I’ve not transcribed the whole solo, just my favourite most ‘Clapton’ part and the lead in and out of it.
Let’s take a listen and have a look at my transcription.
The line in question always reminds me of why I love Clapton and why I love the guitar. It’s just so expressive. I’m talking about bars 3&4 of my transcription: the line Eric plays over the I VI II V progression.
What Eric is doing here is outlining chord tones using very expressive & perfectly intonated bends.
Over the D (I chord) he bends up to the major 3rd (F#) then over the B7 (VI7 chord) he bends up to the root (B), he then bends the E up to an F# before releasing it back to the E (root) over the E7 (II7 chord) finishing the phrase by bending up to the b7 (G) of the A7 (V7 chord) as the beginning of a Dm pentatonic line which he plays over the subsequent turnaround.
Now don’t get me wrong, I very much doubt that Eric was thinking about any of this whilst he was doing it - his ears would have lead him to this beautiful phrase - but for the purposes of understanding what’s happening and building on this concept in your own playing it helps to know what’s going on.
Eric is always bending to a chord tone from a tone (2 half steps) below. Perhaps you could try bending to chord tones of a simple I IV V blues from a tone below - targeting each chord.
Here are a couple of tips:
The major 3rd of the IV chord is a tone above the 5th of the parent minor pentatonic eg the 3rd of G7 (B) is a tone above the 5th of Dm Pentatonic (A) so you can target the IV chord by bending the 5th of the I chord up a tone.
The 5th of the V chord is a tone above the root of the parent minor pentatonic eg the 5th of A7 (E) is a tone above the root of D so you can target the V chord by bending the root of the I chord up a tone.
See if you can find any other tasty chord tones to bend up to and in the process you may sound more like Eric…..
Below I’ve embedded the performance in question and at the bottom of the page I’ve included the music slowed to 70% speed so that you can practice along.
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Thanks so much, James.