“WAY COOL JR.”
Ratt
FEATURING AN INFECTIOUS swing-16ths groove and soulful guitar riffs and licks, this late-Eighties gem showcases Ratt’s highly appealing “blues-rock hair metal” swagger. Guitarists Warren DeMartini and Robbin Crosby serve up tastefully crafted parts that incorporate elements of traditional, “swampy” blues playing, such as fingerpicking open-position E minor pentatonic melodies over a “dead thumb” open low-E-string pedal tone and chromatically resolving 6th intervals (see bars 13, 20 and 56), combined with flashy modern rock techniques like palm muting (P.M.), string bends, finger vibratos and pinch harmonics (P.H.).
When playing the song’s intro and first verse, which are performed fingerstyle, you’ll want to keep your pick tucked into your palm for quick retrieval and deployment at bar 16, to play the subsequent riffs leading up to the song’s first pre-chorus. Note the use of hybrid picking (pick and fingers technique) to articulate the previously mentioned 6th intervals in bar 20, which are on non-adjacent strings.
The song’s pre-chorus features an inventive chord progression that incorporates the use of classical-style inversions, specifically with the 3rd of the chord in the bass in the F#/A# E/G#
and voicings. Notice how, in his Gtr. 1 part, DeMartini alternates between picking the descending bass notes on his low E string with strumming or picking higher chord tones on the D, G and B strings. Using string skipping to break up the chords in this way produces a tighter sound than just strumming all the notes of each chord together, and it also adds an interesting rhythmic flair to the figure. At the end of the second and third pre-choruses, at bar 36, the guitarist again employs hybrid picking, to double the ascending bass line “walkup” with downstrokes while plucking the open B and high E strings, similar to what Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page did in “The Lemon Song.”
Also showcased here is DeMartini’s signature flashy “blues-rock shred” soloing, with his liberal use of pull-offs, hammer-ons and finger slides in the performance of smoothly flowing streams of 16th-note-triplet runs, as well as his polished slide playing (see the Gtr. 3 part).