“REDEMPTION”

Joe Bonamassa

THE TITLE TRACK from Joe Bonamassa’s 2018 studio album, this earthy, downtempo song features the guitarist in a serious, soul-searching mood, with swampy, drop-D-tuned acoustic and electric riffs, impassioned vocals and a fiery guitar solo. (The three-part female background vocals are great too!)

Joe makes great use of a slide in the song’s repeating two-bar intro riff, crafting a haunting low-register melody that’s based on the D minor pentatonic scale (D, F, G, A, C), with the added B note at the end of bar 2 implying a warm-sounding G/B chord and adding a D Dorian-mode flavor (D, E, F, G, A, B, C) to the phrase. Notice how the guitarist swoops into certain notes from below, which is a highly expressive decorative embellishment and a slide guitar signature. As you play this figure (Rhy. Fig. 1) and alternate between placing the slide against the strings and lifting it off them to sound the open-string notes, use a light touch with the slide and take care not to inadvertently cause the strings to “fret out” and “clank” against the frets, which is all too easy to do down in the lower positions, especially if your guitar has low action at the nut. (Guitars that are set up specifically for slide playing typically have higher action at the nut, for this very reason.)

Joe’s non-slide single-note solo (see section I) features the guitarist doing some bluesy shredding on a standard-tuned ax, playing over a repeating “Kashmir”-like riff in the key

5

4 of D and meter. Using mostly notes from the D minor pentatonic scale, Joe rips out some fast, deftly articulated licks, mixing bursts of alternate picking with some well-placed pulloffs, hammer-ons and finger slides. As you play through the solo, you’ll notice how the guitarist quickly shifts positions from one D minor pentatonic “box” pattern to another, to expand his note range. Particularly challenging are the blazing runs he plays in bar 36, where he shifts and reaches up to grab the high C note at the 20th fret then shifts back down to lower positions, so as to stay mostly on the top three strings.