Online lesson #1 - Slips Away by Andy Timmons solo Analysis

Hi Welcome to my first online guitar lesson. I’d like to share a few things with you guys about constructing/improvising solo lines and I’ll to use the song “Slip Away" by Andy Timmons as an example. We will focus on the first solo in the song starting at 2:04s

Let’s have a listen to the original solo

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Sounds pretty nice right? It’s also played with a slide. Now it doesn’t really matter too much if you don’t have one. Instead you can work on your techniques and phrasing to make it sounds like the original solo as much as you can and that’s actually a very good discipline too but that’s another story which we will talk about some other time..

The chord progression of the solo section of the song is / D / G / Gm / D / Bm / F# / C add9 / G /

Now you can pretty much “get away” with playing just the D major / Ionian scale however upon closer examination the some of the notes in the chords Gm F# and C add9 are not in the D major/ Ionian scale.

The D major / Ionian scale has the notes

D E F# G A B C# D

As you can see the notes in Gm are

G Bb D

In F#

F# A# C#

In C add 9

C E G D

Comparing those notes with the D major scale we can see that at Gm chord the note Bb is probably a better choice to played rather then the note B and for F# chord we can play A# instead of A and for C chord avoid C#. Now if you listen to Andy’s solo again this is exactly what he did in a very melodic and organic way. The solo isn’t particularly hard to play but it’s the little harmony treatment he did inspire me to write this lesson to share with you guys.

Here is the backing track I make for you to jam with.

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1.Work out the notes of D major scale on a single string say B strings and jam with the backing track using slide or just the fingers and see if your ears can pick up the clash we talked about ( play note B at Gm chord and note A at F# )

2.Now maps out the notes G Bb D for Gm chord, F# A# C# for F# chord and C E G D for C add9 Chord and memorize where they are.

3.Try jam again but this time pay more attention to the harmony.

Have fun jamming and come up with your own ideas  If you have any feedback questions or thoughts you can drop me an email at cereal_killer_jeng@hotmail.com

Cheers

Robin