Lonely in the Night (Eric Johnson) - Solo 1 Tribute by Peter C

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#1

Hey all,

I recently revisited an older piece with an intention to switch things up sonically and musically, and although I think I chose one of the more iconic pieces to improvise over, I think I have just about managed to achieve a balance between a healthy tribute and a note for note cover.

Because I’ve almost worn out my ears from the studio albums, I’ve been listening to more bootlegs and getting some new ideas here and there, and I guess that somehow stuck with me- how I used to play before I knew EJ’s catalogue in depth.

A lot more emphasis on ascending and back and forth runs, and I feel I’ve still yet to exhaust the extent of dwps economy style movements, but I do add the little left hand pull off hammer tricks and sometimes just pure string hopping just to make the licks pop a little more. In many ways I still feel I am worse at ascending movements than I am descending, hence the aforementioned emphasis about the phrasing.

Only the guitar changed- a les paul through a tubescreamer, then a timeline delay into a marshall 2016x, then a suhr rl through logic x.

Thanks for listening as always and stay safe :slight_smile:

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#2

Awesome as always man! Funny that you say you struggle more with ascending vs descending with these kind of licks, I am definitely the opposite.

1 Like
#3

Me too! I feel like when I ascend (each string change, my tracking goes towards the floor), gravity helps my tracking and gets me to the next string easily. I feel like I’m fighting this when I descend (tracking goes to the ceiling). It could indicate that I’m not getting quite enough escape–I need a bigger movement. I’m still very new to USX, but I’m prioritizing because I’ve learned my problem over the years was my rigid upwards pickslant. I can’t even call it DSX because I think I was always trapped in both directions. Most of the lines I want to play lend themselves to USX and DWPS…gotta learn it!

Anyway, sorry @Peter_C, not trying to hijack your post! Excellent playing, as always!

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#4

Hey no problem Joe- any picking discourse is valid here :slight_smile:

I feel like I’m the odd one out when I hear folks say descending is easier than ascending (in this type of pattern and context), because I wish I had that problem.

It may either be down to conditioning (I do remember playing more descending stuff when I first started playing electric guitar, because the ascending was too “widdly widdly” for me). Most of my ascending widdlies were self-made with various hammer ons (more like hams really) and pull offs and various cheats I’d dare not be caught red handed on CTC :slight_smile:

Another reason might be that I’m not as rigorous with picking every note when I ascend because I like the tempo and phrasing, not necessarily the machine-gun stutter like effect which I dislike for my tastes. Also doing it “my way” allows me to start slow and quickly build tempo to exaggerate this cascade effect, but perhaps I am just making excuses here. My way is really just me saying I cheat by doing stealth hammer ons so that my right hand doesn’t have to do more work. Really puts the economy in economy picking eh? Troy might call blasphemy if he really knew what I was doing with some of my ascending runs XD

As always, glad you enjoyed it.