“DEAD INSIDE”
Nita Strauss
THIS NEW TRACK from Nita Strauss’ upcoming second solo album features the rising-star metal guitar goddess collaborating with Disturbed vocalist David Draiman in the creation of a well-written song that strikes the perfect balance between flashy, virtuosic hard-rock riffing and compositional depth, catchiness and appeal.
Nita kindly informed us that she had employed a couple of different guitar tunings for the recorded arrangement of the song, using drop-D down a whole step, or what some refer to as “drop-C” tuning (low to high: C, G, C, F, A, D) for some parts and, for others, such as the main riff in bars 5-8, regular drop-D tuning (low to high: D, A, D, G, B, E). For our transcribed arrangement, however, we ended up following Nita’s own recent decision, for live performance of the song, to arrange all the guitar parts for standard tuning down a whole step, what’s also known as “D standard” tuning (low to high: D, G, C, F, A, D), as we likewise felt that this facilitates a more practical approach to playing the song live. For example, the previously mentioned riff in bars 5-8 has you playing the fretted notes two frets higher than where they were originally tracked (in regular drop-D tuning) while still being able to utilize your open 6th string to get those low open D notes, which works out well. Performing this part in “drop-C” tuning would make it, as Nita put it, “doable, but a pain in the ass.”
Nita most likely recorded the fast singlenote pedal-tone riff at section D (Gtr. 1 part) in drop-D tuning, which would allow her to conveniently consolidate all the notes in bars 13-15 onto one string, the 4th, and “bounce” the fretted notes off the open string, which is a classic hard rock/metal move to do with this kind of pedal-tone riff, and similar to the other one Nita crafted for the song’s chorus using her B string (see section E, Gtr. 1 part). In our arrangement, we have the low pedal-tone notes in bars 13-15 tabbed as “E,” at the 7th fret on the A string, and the higher notes played on the G string. Granted, this requires some deft string skipping, which makes the part a little more technically challenging to play than picking all the notes on a single string, but this is how Nita herself plays the song live.