All About You by Eric Johnson Tone and Technique

Playing Technique
#1

Although Cliffs is obviously his most well known song and solo, I lean more towards the Desert Rose solo as my favorite (or maybe Lonely In The Night) but I think that All About You is his most difficult. Some of the runs in that are just ridiculous and made all the more difficult by whatever the hell picking technique he’s using. I vaguely remember reading an interview when Venus Isle came out where he talks about developing a picking technique for this particular solo, but not what it actually is. Maybe the rounder edge of the pick, or rubbing/sliding instead of actually picking.

Anyone either remember that interview or know what he’s doing to get that sound?

#2

I’m right there with you. I lean more towards the Desert Rose and Lonely In The Night solos, Venus Isle as well. All About You is his most fiery. Insane and overlooked. The Hal Leonard book is helpful for dissecting the strange finger positions in the voice leading passages. The solo itself is simple, a two chord vamp from Bb major to Bb minor, two bars for each. What’s not easy is the speed and inhuman fluidity in which he executes these lines. Basic solo themes are arpeggios ascending and pentatonic descending.
A perfect example of this is at 5:08.

As far as technique goes, try rotating the jazz iii pick to the fat side, reduce pick attack and maximize fluidity.

The solo starts with an extra bloomy fuzz tone, in my opinion his best . The lead tone kicks in after the interlude at 5:29 for those call and response lines. He cut most of the leads for Venus Isle on his 335, any PAF guitar with a great setup will allow you to get somewhere in the ballpark.

This solo kicks my ass, and it’s my favorite of his aside from Lonely In The Night. Good luck to you brother.

#3

Also I have a copy of that guitar player magazine with EJ on the cover, issued September 1996. That interview is inside, I can send you pictures if you leave your email. As awesome as this forums is it won’t let me post pictures.

#4

It’s one of the harder solos I ever tried to play back when the album and book came out. I never came close to getting it up to speed, hell, I never even got it actually memorized but I really wanted to adopt the technique for other stuff. Would be such a cool trick to have in the bag. Now that I’m playing again, I’m woodshedding the shit out of all of his stuff. It’s so much easier on the hands than all of the Satch, Vai and DT stuff I grew up playing. If I went full-out on those guys stuff like I used to do, my hands would fall off lol

I find it kind of funny how when it comes to music in general (aside from a lot of hip-hop when I’m in the mood) what I listen to most is either the 3 I listed above (and a few of those similar) or heavy music that’s often obscure and kind of insane. It was my bread and butter back in the early 2k’s when I toured and aside from an obsession with Zappa for about a decade, that was about it.

But EJ’s playing has always fascinated me. To be honest, I don’t like many aspects of his music and kind of hate his vocals (I even did an edit of his songs with vocals so I could listen to the solos without them when I got pro-tools back in the early 2k’s). And as for Cliffs, aside from the beginning of the ACL versions (84 and 88) I don’t care if I ever hear that song again lol But goddammit I love his solos. I don’t think I’ve ever nailed a single one of his outside of OG Cliffs. They’re all so damn fun to play at any speed. And even at a snail’s pace, it’s clear whose they came from. Every aspect is so freaking musical. So much to learn from it, even just one lick.

I still have that book and there’s also a SoundSlice for it that has a few differences, but still pretty good. I actually think that SoundSlice’s tab for the Desert Rose solo is better in a quite a few spots. I had a ridiculously huge guitar mag collection until around 2003 when I was playing a relocation that didn’t end up happening. I’m pretty sure I had 95% of all of the guitar mags ever produced in the US and maybe 50 or so of Young Guitar from Japan. Wish I still had those…