Jeff beck

5 min read

10 TRADEMARK TECHNIQUES AND THREE FULL SOLOS

This month John Wheatcroft pays tribute to Jeff Beck, perhaps the ultimate guitarist’s guitarist, who tragically died in January this year of bacterial meningitis.

ABILITY RATING

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Key Various

Tempo Various

Moderate/Advanced ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪

Will improve your…

Expressive delivery

Articulation and attack

Blues and rock vocabulary

Everyone at Guitar Techniques was greatly saddened to learn of the death of Jeff Beck earlier this year, at the age of 78. The music community was hit hard and the tributes came in thick and fast. Jeff was a truly special and significant guitarist, with a unique and constantly evolving sound and a true artistic sense of exploration and rediscovery that spanned his entire career. This started way back in the 1960s with The Tridents and The Yardbirds, right up to the present day, with two collaborative projects released in 2022 with Johnny Depp and Ozzy Osbourne.

TECHNIQUE FOCUS

Slide and Harmonica Emulation

For some of our Examples you’ll need bags of gain and a guitar with a floating vibrato. Jeff would both raise and lower the strings’pitch to conjure up a huge range of sounds. Two we’re looking at here are using the bar to emulate a slide, and to mimic the bending of a blues harp master like LittleWalter. The technique is broadly similar for both, but for slide emulation the vibrato goes below and above the target pitch. Jeff often scooped the bar before sounding and then let the string to come back up to pitch before adding vibrato. For harmonica emulation, the bends only go flat, so vibrato doesn’t travel above our target note. Beck often played a note at pitch then rapidly depressed the bar, sometimes to an absolute pitch a semitone or tone lower. From a picking perspective, the hand position might take a little getting used to. Try holding the bar between your third and fourth fingers, pick with the thumb, first and second fingers; Jeff sometimes ran his first finger along the bar and picked with his thumb and other fingers. Mute all idle bass strings with any available digit or part of the hand, or you’ll be fighting unwanted noise. Jeff loved gain and played quite loud, two factors that necessitate good muting technique.

A pivotal figure in the development of London psychedelic pop, heavy metal and jazz-rock fusion, Beck was a virtuoso performer, considered by many to be the world’s greatest electric guitarist. Even with this reputation, Jeff refused to rely on past glories, continuing to refine his sound to evolve constantly, consistently moving into uncharted territory while always retaining one vital element, a complete mastery of the blues. Eric Clapton defined Beck as “a rock and roll musician who understands jazz, and that’s a very rare animal”.

This article is from...

Guitar Techniques Magazine

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