“IT’S A MOOT POINT”
Melanie Faye
THIS SUBLIMELY
SOULFUL r&b song showcases fingerstyle electric guitar sensation Melanie Faye’s highly creative and inventive approaches to composition and technique, as well as her musical depth and tasteful note choices for voicing chords and playing melodies.
The guitarist crafted most of the song’s parts by spinning colorful variations on the four-chord progression introduced in bars 1 and 2. No doubt inspired in part by Jimi Hendrix’s elegantly melodic rhythm playing and Stevie Wonder’s sparse but harmonically rich keyboard chord voicing approach, she mostly eschews the redundant octave doubling of standard barre chords. Instead, Melanie favors economical and sometimes angular interval stacks that highlight the chord’s essential root and major or minor 3rd, along with upper-structure chord tones, such as the 7th and 9th, while mostly avoiding the 5th, which is superfluous in this jazz-informed style.
Faye arpeggiates most of the song’s chords, using her thumb and fingers to pick the strings. On beats 2 and 4 of most of the bars, she’ll apply a funk-bass-like thumb slap to her 4th string, muted by the fret hand (indicated by an X). This produces a pitchless, percussive accent on these backbeats, where a drummer would typically hit the snare. When soloing, the guitarist will sometimes join her pick-hand thumb and index finger together, as if holding an invisible pick, and use the nail of her index finger to brush the string downward or upward. The quick 16th-note triplets in bar 38 are articulated this way.
As the song’s repeating chord progression
F# major/D# is in the concert key of minor (note the use of a capo in the Gtr. 1 part), Melanie bases most of her solo lines, which she overdubbed without a capo (see the Gtr. 2 part) on the associated relative major and minor pentatonic scales. Notice how the guitarist makes expressive use of vibrato, bends, hammer-ons, pull-offs and especially finger slides, often venturing up and down a single string to create slippery, sitar-like melodies that bring to mind Derek Trucks’ exciting slide playing.