BRETT GARSED solos over... Back In The Day

This month Brett Garsed demonstrates some astonishing ‘faux pedal steel’ slide guitar over an upbeat sounding pop groove from Jason. Jon Bishop is your guide.

Brett continues his video series by explaining his clean slide soloing over another specially written track by music editor Jason Sidwell.

For this eight part series we invited Aussie session ace Brett Garsed to improvise a two-minute solo over eight of Jason Sidwell’s GT backing tracks. Each of these backing tracks presents a unique set of challenges, and this month Brett has opted for a rather interesting ‘faux pedal steel’ type vibe over Jason’s track Back In The Day. Brett has developed a unique and inspired slide style that is very versatile. First let’s take a look at the basics of good slide technique.

Slide guitar has a couple of significant barriers to entry. The first is establishing a good consistent contact between the slide and the string. You may find heavier strings and a higher action can help here. The second is to be able to mute unwanted strings from ringing both behind and in front of the slide. Once you have mastered these two you can then work on the intonation of the slide positioning. Brett uses a couple advanced concepts when playing slide and has mastered playing slide in standard tuning.

Brett places the slide on his second finger, which allows for digits of the fretting hand to be used and means the slide can be angled easily. Placing the slide at an angle makes it possible to access intervals that would normally not be available in standard tuning. Brett also uses fingers of the fretting hand both behind and in front of the slide to fret notes. These advanced concepts are pretty tricky to master, but are well worth the effort.

If you check out the video’s intro, Brett skilfully demonstrates all these techniques in his spoken introduction and we have also tabbed these out for you to practise.

The backing track is in A major, apart from four bars in the bridge (bar 39-42) where it moves to chords from C major. The phrases in this solo are tasteful and well chosen and, as Brett explains, they are inspired by the sound of the pedal steel.

The notation contains all of the articulations and phrasing from the video performance. It’d be well worth taking a close look at the way Brett picks the phrases. Hopefully there will be a new technique, lick or phrase in here for you to perfect. If you find one you like, memorise it and use it in future solos (even a few of these licks in a solo will have people’s eyes popping!).

Once you have mastered some of the concepts in Brett’s solo try creating one of your own over the same backing track. The handy one-page chord chart of the backing track is there to help you plan your solo. Have fun... and good luck!

NEXT MONTH Brett amazes with another solo, this time over Jason’s original track Grind.

I wasn’t getTING much out of the distorted slide approach, so I thought I’d do my fake pedal steel Brett Garsed

This month Brett takes a smooth and clean approach with the slide

Brett Garsed will astound you with his playing on this month’s track

Brett played his blue ESP on the bridge pickup with tone backed off to 50%. He used a Fractal Audio AX-8 amp modeller with a Marshall JTM ‘jumped’ amp selected with Treble Drive set to 3.5, Normal Drive on 3 and Master Volume at 10. Two virtual Marshall 4x12 cabinets were panned in stereo. Spring reverb was set to 10% and stereo tape delay also set to 10%.