This is one of my favorite songs to play on guitar. Finding a drummer and bass player who know this song has been a challenge.
Tag Archives: Guitar
Racing the World
Steve Vai has been called a guitar virtuoso. His 1990 album Passion and Warfare is often cited by critics and fans alike as among his best works. Particularly the instrumental “For the Love of God” has received a lot of attention from the music press, and is noteworthy in that the entire six-minute piece was reportedly recorded in just one take. Vai’s playing style has been characterized as quirky and angular, due to his technical ability with the guitar instrument and deep knowledge of music theory. He regularly uses odd rhythmic groupings and his melodies often employ the Lydian mode.
Perhaps his most readily-identifiable stylistic feature is his creative use of the floating vibrato, using it to add melodic lines that sound odd to the ear. His playing can be described as lyrical, as if sung by a human voice. During the recording of “Eat ’em and Smile” with David Lee Roth, he employed several guitar techniques that “mimicked” the human voice, as heard in the opening bars of the opening track “Yankee Rose.” He is noted for being physically expressive as he plays his guitar. He often uses exotic guitars: he plays both double and triple neck guitars.
In this video, Steve demonstrates an Ibanez guitar using the wammy / vibrato bar to create sonic sounds not commonly heard, but he sets them into a very melodic line of the song.
Smoke on the Water: Japanese or Original with Steve Morse – What Say You?
OK music fans..
My friend Katy Lundeen turned me onto the Japanese orchestra performance of:
Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple
This is a very popular song because of its catchy chord combination:
Pretty good, unique arrangement, and a big sound.
But, then I desired to remember what really attracted me to the song when it came out on August 16, 1972 – also played IN JAPAN by Deep Purple. So, I went looking for the song and found STEVE MORRIS is now playing this song with Deep Purple.
Smoke on the Water tells the true story about December 4, 1971 when the Deep Purple band was set up in Montreux, Switzerland preparing to record an album. The Montreux Casino (referred to as “the gambling house” in the song) was hosting Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention (another favorite group of mine) with a concert held in the casino’s theater. During the show, in the middle of Don Preston’s synthesizer solo on “King Kong”, the casino caught fire when someone in the audience fired a flare gun into the rattan covered ceiling, which is mentioned in the song as “some stupid with a flare gun.” The fire destroyed the entire casino complex, along with all the Mothers’ equipment. The “smoke on the water” that became the title of the song (credited to bass guitarist Roger Glover, who related how the title occurred to him when he suddenly woke from a dream a few days later) referred to the smoke from the fire spreading over Lake Geneva from the burning casino as the members of Deep Purple watched the fire from their hotel across the lake.
Now you know the rest of the story!
Steve Morris is a hard-rock guitar player’s envy! Watch what this young man can do with left-handed hammer-ons (no picking).
So, what say you? Do you like Deep Purple and this song? How about that story in the song?
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- Steve Morse – Re-issues Coming in January (hardrockhideout.com)
The Saxophone cries out, “Fly on, Little Wing.”
James Marshall Hendrix (born: 11-27-1942) was a black man who became a rock and roll hero, a flashy super-star who seemed to be the essence of the spaced-out, druggy sixities, Hendrix was, in reality, quiet, withdrawn, and somewhat inarticulate, except when he had a guitar in his hands.
Continue reading The Saxophone cries out, “Fly on, Little Wing.”