Bad company

Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love

You’re in good company here as Jon Bishop tabs this hugely popular rocker from the 80s. But was it open C or open G tuning?

Can’t Get Enough was released in 1974 and was featured on Bad Company’s eponymous debut album. The opening guitar part, performed by Mick Ralphs, is one of those classic riffs and it is a lot of fun to play.

The song uses two classic, blues style, three-chord tricks. The opening riff, verse and bridge use F, Bb and C - the I, IV, and V chords in the key of F. The chorus is C, F and G - another I, IV, V, this time in C. Feel-wise it’s a shuffle with all the quavers swung. The tempo moves around a bit, so for the GT recording we have selected a happy medium and set an easy tempo of 124bpm for the whole piece.

Perhaps the most interesting thing from our perspective is the guitar tuning. Mick Ralphs originally wrote Can’t Get Enough in open G tuning. Singer Paul Rodgers liked the song but requested the key be changed from G to C. To make this possible Ralphs tuned all the strings up a 4th, which required the fitting of lighter strings due to the dramatically increased tension on the neck. However, we have chosen to tab the song in open G tuning so as to be accessible to all guitarists without the need to change setups. It will also help to preserve the guitar necks of the nation and make all the lead and rhythm work playable in one performance. To re-tune from standard tuning simply drop the sixth, fifth and first strings down a tone. If you strum the strings from the fifth string up, the chord of G major is produced; you can now add melody notes to this G major foundation with relative ease.

Many styles use open G tuning including the Hawaiian ‘slack key’ and Delta blues slide genres. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones is also a fan of open G for general riff action (think of Brown Sugar and Start Me Up), as

As a one finger barre is all that’s required to play a major chord with the Open G tuning, the other fingers are free to play melody notes.

are Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt of Status Quo (Down Down etc). The rhythm guitar on Can’t Get Enough is very much in this vein.

A one-finger barre is all that’s required to play any major chord on the neck, so the other fingers are free to play melody notes on top. the song will sound great with your bridge pickup selected and a gritty, overdriven tone.

There is a fair bit of lead work to navigate at the end of song. This has also been arranged to be played on a guitar tuned to open G so you can play the whole song from start to finish with the backing track. In a two-guitar band the solo can be performed on a standard tuned guitar and it will work fine, as all of the notes fall on the ‘un-detuned’ strings.

As the soloing only comes over the chorus chord pattern of C, F and G, Bad Company axe man Mick Ralphs uses the tried and tested blues trick of mixing the C Major and C Minor Pentatonic scales. There are some tips of the hat to bluesmen like Albert King who combine simple signature licks with string bending and vibrato. There are also some tone-and-a-half bends to navigate, so be sure to warm up before attempting such heroics. Singerguitarist Paul Rodgers played the harmonised first solo along with Ralphs.

The audio features a recreation of the original track, and a backing track with all the transcribed parts removed for you to practice with. Our track has the same count-in as the original, which goes one, two, one, two, three.

Finally, many thanks to Pete Riley for recording and performing the drums!