Great music riff

Also, I am in Greece and watched Greece vs Jordan. Rondae Hollis Jefferson looks like Jordan in FIBA

Songwriter Lindsey Buckingham told Rolling Stone:

That was a very naive song. I had broken up with Stevie and maybe met someone. It could have been someone who really didn’t mean a thing.

Co-producer Ken Caillat told Rolling Stone he made guitar techs restring Buckingham’s guitar every twenty minutes when recording this song:

I wanted to get the best sound on every one of his picking parts. I’m sure the roadies wanted to kill me. Restringing the guitar three times every hour was a bitch. But Lindsey had lots of parts on the song, and each one sounded magnificent.

i remember after hearing that song for the first time being really surprised i liked it so much…it sounded so different from anything else i had heard before…

that’s a bit chilly: hooked up with someone who didn’t really mean anything…

One of the most impossible things to play that doesn’t even sound that difficult is “Never Going Back Again” by Fleetwood Mac, which is just the most insane Travis picking thing. This guy in this YouTube video does a great job of explaining why it’s so impossible to play, and why it’s so great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeNyc9pXm1w&t=435s

But, like with RJ and Jimmy Butler, it’s a lot easier to emulate a song that it is to emulate a career!

(Edited to add the exclamation mark)

Can you shed some light on that? In other words, can someone at your skill level pretty much copy 99% of the riffs and solos out there? And if not, what’s the nature of the obstacles from player to player?

Interesting question.

For starters, I’d say this: all players have a ceiling to their technique or what we also call “chops.” In the professional world, I’m not really an elite “chops” player by any stretch of the imagination. My strengths are time-feel, versatility, and (I’ve been told) taste. Guitar is my second instrument, and I’m not the kind of player who can perfectly mimic the most difficult Eddie Van Halen solos, or play like John McLaughlin or Yngwie Malmsteen or any of those elite shredders. That’s simply beyond my ceiling of technique. There are some other styles that are really difficult to play, like for instance bluegrass flat picking. I don’t think my fingers could ever move that fast if I practiced the rest of my life.

But short of that kind of stuff, I’d say that yes, I could probably play 99% of what’s out there. I could definitely play the “Sultans Of Swing” solo, and during the pandemic I actually got into a hobby of learning a bunch of difficult but not impossible guitar solos, and it was a lot of fun. I got really into Larry Carlton’s solos, learned his solos from “Kid Charlemagne” and “Don’t Take Me Alive” and I also went back and learned some Zeppelin and Hendrix and Clapton solos. Those are all attainable to somebody like me if I put in the work. At least, I can get my fingers on all of the frets at the right time. “Kid Charlemagne” took me a while to get together, I had to practice that for hours to be able to get through it.

To actually PLAY like, for instance, Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughan or Prince or something… that’s a whole other thing. Those are guitarists that have incredibly strong voices, extremely forceful phrasing and command of their tone and so on. Like Jeff Beck, for instance: I could probably learn most Jeff Beck songs note for note, but he’s a magician when it comes to phrasing, the most accurate string bender who ever lived. He also often has his amp dialed in so it’s right on the verge of feedback, so he’s able to coax that feedback out of it in just the right amounts at just the right times to generate extra overtones and really make his playing sing. That stuff is basically impossible to emulate. Those are really my favorite kinds of guitarists, the guys who have something beyond technique, who have a strong voice as players.