There is really no way to comprehensively explain a guitar player's style in a podcast but what I would hope to do with this is give some beginner blues players some tips on just how Albert King gets his guitar sound and some of the stylistic approaches that he has.
The first thing that you want to understand about Albert King is that he actually played his guitar left handed and upside down, so just as if I were to take this right handed guitar and turn it to left handed without rearranging the strings at all. So what that meant was with Albert King's guitar he was -- if you kind of imagine this was in the left hand scenario, the high E string, the skinny string would actually be on the top and the low E string, the heavier string would be on the bottom down here.
So what actually happened was he would effectively yank the strings down with his fingers, and that gave him some options that are little bit difficult when you are trying to actually emulate that sound on a standard strung guitar. Simple enough if you are playing in G like a G blues scale here to take let's say the C here at the 8th fret and bend that up a whole step. And on his guitar since he would be yanking it down, that would mean his third finger would be pulling down like this. But what you can also do is take the first finger then actually pull this B flat down and that would be just as easy to yank that down or pretty easy --.
To emulate that, you literally have to take your first finger here and push it up which is little bit tricky, that's one of the key things to Albert King's sound is to get that kind of --. The first finger bending that in this case the B flat in the G blues scale. So you can imagine all of the little idiosyncrasies that would go with having a guitar that is actually strung upside down.
A couple of the other things that are really huge to his sound is the fact that he played a flying V guitar with relatively heavy strings and in many cases he actually tuned his strings down even as low as C in some cases from E. And that would allow him to do those kinds of extreme bends, I mean more than any other guitar player.
Albert King is known for his bending, whereas B. B. king might be known for his phrasing and different tone things. Albert King really was the king of bending blues bends and he would do all sorts of wild bends, up a whole step and beyond and everywhere in between. So if he was going to take that note the C then the D there. He is a real funky, you know, technically out of tune but great in terms of blues kind of bends.
And just the approach, just the strength of his hands, he was a big guy; he had big hands, heavy strings, heavy guitar. This guitar has got 10s on it. So it doesn't really represent the heavy string sound too well. But if you had heavy strings let's say 11s or really even higher on your guitar and it was tuned down a bit, it actually won't be that tough to bend but you get a big sound out of it.
The only thing is the fact that he would use his hands to pick the strings; many times his thumb or he would yank with his first finger, so you could have that kind of plucked sound with the thumb. He also attempted to use a lot of reverb. One of the things that I noticed listening to Albert King about Albert King is that he tends to play those real slow blueses or some real funky up-tempo blueses, with a bounce to them, and it seems like it's one or the other with them, which is both a great examples, really a different a different sound among his playing.
The fact he is playing his guitar upside down and backwards probably is Albert King's second most unconventional habit as a guitar player was the fact that he played through solid state amps most of the time. And for blues guitar players there is especially two amps in vintage, two amps in the norm, and with this Roland Jazz Chorus 120 that you are looking at right now, it's a very clean amp. This is actually the amp that he tended to favor. He played through a few different solid state amps but this was the one you would see him most often playing through. And when you crank this amp up, that is 120 watts a solid state power so you can get pretty loud and it does have some power behind it. It has got two 12 inches speakers. But the thing about it is the fact that he was playing a flying V with a humbucker so the nature of his guitar being a high output guitar, it had a lot of power behind the guitar, and of course his playing had a lot of power behind it too.
It actually sounded really great through this amp. So if you get the flying V with the bridge pickup, and that's another thing too. He tend to use mostly the bridge pickups so you have that real bright, I would not call it screechy, it had a real bright tone. It really cut through and it's cliché to say that he really made the guitar cry, that's that sound of a crying blues guitar is really the main thing with his tone.
And fingerpicking if you want to try and play upside down and backwards, that's up to you but that's really a huge part of his sound. And just the fact that he was the kind of guitar player that, he didn't play by the rules in terms of his own approach. He did everything you weren't supposed to do in terms of just picking up the guitar and playing it the wrong way technically. It's a sure fair way to get a unique sound out of the guitar; if you kind of approach it a little differently or in some cases a lot differently than the standard norms. So that is a little about the style of Albert King.
Just push that up a whole step, 11th fret on the 1st string, 13th on the 2nd and then 11 A on the 2nd string, bending the 10 fret up a whole step. The idea is to get with this frets from this upper position of the C scale, the C blues scale into this 8th fret position. He always does a little --.
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