We Will Rock You

Naudo played "We Will Rock You" recently and I couldn't leave it alone. Since it just Em all the way through, then 2 bars of C, then A until the end, how hard could it be?

But now I'm beating myself up about it a lot.  Because it's now all about the touch.  Let's discuss.

Naudo plays the two bass notes E+B, more of a strum for most of it. I didn't want to hold onto the B the whole time, and my right hand position is more of a thumb fingerpick than a thumb strum, so I resolved to just the bass E for the Boom Boom...then I felt the CLAP! needed top three trebles filling out the Em...if I was to play just the top two strings it would be a pure (abiguous) E5 which is okay but hey, I'm playing a classical guitar - Em gives it a great Spanish feel doesn't it?

So now playing the verse words you really want to keep that big "Boom Boom CLAP rest" going, it is a pivotal part of the song. The clap just becomes the "usual flick" on the 3rd beat, but wow, Boom Boom and rest are so hard to play like clockwork.  After years of playing melodies over basslines, my fingers just want to naturally fill the space where the rest is, and quite often want to take a break from the second Boom.

What's going on in my head is a really unusual fight but if I relax into it, while concentrating hard then it flows nicely. I'm singing the words and playing the melody in my head, but letting the clockwork happen underneath. Did I mention it is really unusual? And, as mentioned the touch needs to be just right, this arrangement is about the feel not so much the notes.

Naudo improvised some great jazzy stuff  in it, but this is me, and I want the studio solo at the end.  I'm picturing Mike Meyers as Wayne playing it on the white Strat.  A good resolve fell out, than can be played on the Boom Boom CLAP rest...if you have >14 frets available. It was possible to bring it down so that the highest note is only the 14th fret, so playable on the classical, but it makes the fingering less natural, and to get the pull-offs right I had to drop a note in the essential chord and make sure it doesn't ring by lightly leaning on it during the pull-off.  Look, it works, but again, see: unusual.

Alright, this is all very cryptic, I need to record it so you can see it don't I!

As an aside, I'm still playing with text-to-image AI as you can see.  It's so cool, so brilliant, and yet so awkward and misses the mark.  The first picture up there, which is Bing Image Create (a version of DALL E, April 2023) really captures the text I put in "music we will rock you".  It channelled Brian May, got the dimly lit smoky stage feel, the rocker clothes and the triumphant rock hand held high in the air...wait - what is THAT?  Ha ha, so close, and yet just comical.  I won't show the other one that had me rolling in stitches, suffice to say, a giant three fingered fist with the middle finger raised.  Ah, the AIs, so good but that tiny last detail not quite understood changes everything.

The second picture is also funny - the prompt was "music we will rock you outdoor". And there you go, some sort of amplifier fused into a rock. What a work of art, I want one, my very own "WH Sowtur iWuck".

The text-to-image is improving so fast from just a few months back when I first posted one - I'm imagining there won't be much to laugh at soon enough...