“PARANOID ANDROID”
Radiohead
AN EPIC MODERN rock masterpiece, this song represents a crowning compositional achievement for Radiohead, for which the band creatively strung and wove together a diverse arrangement of musical themes and interludes with vastly contrasting textures and dynamic levels, creating a rich musical journey that spans nearly six and a half minutes, in a way that brings to mind Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Guitarists Ed O’Brien, Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke contribute tastefully constructed and interwoven riffs using acoustic figures and electric parts that are subtly colored by various tonal effects (distortion, phaser, tremolo, slapback delay and octave-up doubling).
You’ll see that the song incorporates some unusual chord shapes, voicings and progressions that are outside the common vocabulary of rock riffage. For example, the semi-arpeggiated “picky-strummy” acoustic figure that begins the song and repeats for the first two verses (see Rhy. Fig. 1, bars 1-6) combines some atypical fretted chord “grips” with open-string “color tones,” such as an added 6th or 9th.
When playing this figure, as well as the Gtr. 2 part that enters at the end of bar 3, use 16thnote “pendulum picking/strumming,” picking any note or chord that falls on the first or third 16th note of the beat — and this includes any eighth notes — with a downstroke and using an upstroke for any 16th-note upbeats. You’ll find that the lowest notes would then be picked with downstrokes and the highest notes with upstrokes. This “outside the strings” picking approach minimizes the amount of movement and effort required, making for a smooth, flowing performance.
This same picking approach works equally well for the sinister-sounding two-bar electric riff that debuts in bar 34 (labeled Rhy. Fig. 2) and serves as the primary theme for the song’s remaining verses. It also works well for the odd-time chord strumming riff in meter introduced in bar 38. For this bar, strum “down down up down up up up down up down up.”
— JIMMY BROWN