New Orleans virtuoso and MD of hit TV show Live From Daryl’s House, Shane pours on some Louisiana hot sauce to spice up your rhythm chops.Andy Saphir is your guide.
In this month’s second video masterclass Shane Theriot demonstrates his phenomenal New Orleans style funk chops in a series of five exercises.
Hailing from Louisiana, not far from new Orleans itself, Theriot is a master guitarist, instructor and producer. A graduate of GIT in Los Angeles he has worked with many A-list artists, including The Neville Brothers, Hall & Oates, Boz Scaggs, Willie Nelson and many more, and is Musical Director of the hit TV show, Live From Daryl’s House, with Daryl Hall.
Theriot has also produced several instructional books, such as New Orleans Funk Guitar Styles, written for GT’s sister magazine Guitar Player, and recorded original albums under his own name, including Still Motion (2017), Dirty Power (2009), and The Grease Factor (2003).
The classic New Orleans style funk sound can be heard from bands like The Meters, Chocolate Milk and Dr John, and its distinctive drum groove. This groove is probably an expanded and built-upon derivative of earlier musical rhythmic traditions of the area, such as those heard in ‘second line’ funeral parades from which jazz itself was born, and provides an infectious groove over which other instruments can overlay rhythmic and melodic phrases to create the swampy funk feel.
Shane demonstrates how to achieve this is in a variety of ways, first of which is in the form of a 3-2 clavé rhythm played with a popular C7 voicing for an E7 chord. This is a two-bar syncopated groove which has three distinct accents in the first bar, and two accents in the second bar. This sits perfectly with the drum pattern, and sounds amazing.
Expanding upon this, Shane next incorporates an upper structure E7 on the third, second and first strings, but building in a single-note line on the fourth, fifth and sixth strings which adds interest and movement to this one-chord groove, again resulting in a fantastic sounding ‘skanky’ funk vibe.
Moving into the key of G Minor, Shane demonstrates how to turn funky triads on the first, second and third strings into a groove by playing a GMinor triad (G-Bb-D) and using an F Major triad (F-A-C) as a passing chord. He also plays a funky blues-style line after the triad part of the groove in a ‘question and answer’ approach. A groove in the key of A Minor follows this, and here Shane employs a double-stop pull-off technique
