“ROLLING 7s”

Dirty Honey

THIS SUPERCATCHY newer rock song offers a fresh helping of meat-and-potatoes Les-Paul-through-a-Marshall bluesy riffing and soloing that recalls the best of the 1980s L.A. hard rock scene, as epitomized by Guns ‘N Roses. Dirty Honey guitarist John Notto is obviously well versed in this classic style and the art of dynamic playing and working a cranked tube amp with your touch. He kicks off the song with a simmering fingerpicked riff that brings to mind what Angus Young does on the AC/ DC songs “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” and “Have a Drink on Me.” Notto softly thumb picks his open low E string in opposition to fingerpicked 3rd and 4th intervals fretted on the D and G strings, adding a touch of soulful finger vibrato to the held notes.

The song builds nicely through the prechorus (section C), leading into the chorus (section D), where Notto and bassist Justin Smolian cut loose with a hard-driving singlenote riff in E that features just the right mix of picked notes, pull-offs, rests and well-placed power chord punctuations. By switching to an aggressive attack with the pick, Notto pushes his amp into thick overdrive, perhaps with the aid of a volume boost on the guitar or a pedal. For his first solo (see section H), Notto C# makes great use of the 9th-position minor C#, F#, G#, pentatonic ( E, B) “box” pattern, using expressive bends and vibratos to make his guitar sing, and additionally incorpates notes C# C#, D#, F#, from the natural minor scale ( E, G#, A, B) over the changing chords to add some melodic color, in a way that brings to mind the soloing styles of Slash, Jimmy Page, Angus Young and Eddie Van Halen.

Notto and his bandmates kick things up a notch for the second solo (see section J). Playing in the key of A here, over a transposed incarnation of the song’s chorus riff, the guitarist gets “busier,” with faster phrases, using notes Eb, from the A minor blues scale (A, C, D, E, G), playing in the 5th-position box, before shifting up to the 14th-position box for the parallel A C#, F#), major blues scale (A, B, C, E, which may F# also be thought of as its relative minor scale, F#, C#, minor blues ( A, B, C, E).