Blues Headlines with Richard Barrett: Peter Green special feature

This issue, Blues Headlines turns a certain shade of Green as Richard Barrett demonstrates how you can capture some of Peter’s flavour in your own playing

HOWEVER TEMPTING it may be to call this Headlines ‘How To Play Like Peter Green’, such a promise would likely disappoint. The subtleties of Peter’s exquisite phrasing are renowned, and were praised by none other than BB King, who said they gave him “chills”. Nevertheless, there is actually no reason why we can’t learn a great deal from listening and emulating, hopefully imbuing our own playing with a little extra class and panache along the way.

Rather than sitting down to practise alternate picking or learn exotic scales and arpeggios, this Headlines is all about the phrasing – which is no less sophisticated but requires a more cerebral approach. Peter always makes each and every note count, giving the impression that he is always fully conscious of what he is playing, as opposed to reeling off licks and adding vibrato by default on held notes. You get the idea! This doesn’t mean he won’t add flurries of notes now and again; it’s just that these are most often the way he would begin or end a phrase, almost like a sax player. You can certainly hear how Gary Moore, to whom Peter was a significant mentor, took this approach further when playing pentatonic runs across the strings.

Having steered the conversation away from the technical side of playing, you’ll find that a lot of the details it’s so easy to take for granted as a listener are where the hardest work will be needed: when (and when not) to add vibrato; quarter-tone bends, long slow bends and pre-bends all need to be as perfectly pitched as possible; and occasional staccato hits and triplets sometimes purposefully pull back against the tempo, too. I’ll get more into all that as we look at each specific example.