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  #1  
Old 05-19-2016, 10:25 AM
Hotspur Hotspur is offline
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Default A little John Martyn riff help

For some reason my brain just does not want to wrap around the riff that occurs at 0:11 and 0:17 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD0V1sdGi88

If you know the song, it's the riff he uses over the melody lines for "For your lack of kind" and "And this she did say."

Anybody want to help an AGFer out?
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Old 05-19-2016, 11:05 AM
stanron stanron is offline
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In what tuning/capo position are you trying this?

Have you tried capo 9 in dropped D?

The sounds at the times you mention use 5th string second fret from capo.
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Old 05-19-2016, 11:12 AM
JonPR JonPR is offline
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I'm a John Martyn fan, but I haven't heard that track before. It would help to know the tuning. The John Martyn site doesn't have tab for it (maybe because it wasn't on the original album). At that time he was using a mix of EADBGE, open D, and his own DADDAD.
It's not terribly important, because it's possible to play what I'm hearing in any of those tunings (or in drop D). It's also possible he was trying out DADGAD, because this arrangement is obviously inspired directly from Davy Graham's, who played it in DADGAD.

The closest I've got to the sound is open D with capo on fret 9. Sounds a bit extreme, but it's suspicious that he never plays a note lower than that bass B. (Open E with capo on 7 would also do it of course.)

That riff you mention is then a simple arpeggio of this chord: (0)-2-0-1-0-(0). (In DADGAD it's even simpler: (0)-2-0-0-0-(0).)

If you find it a squeeze playing with capo up on 9th (Martyn wouldn't have), you could do it in open G with capo on 2 (ignoring 6th string), where that chord would be x-0-2-0-1-0.
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Old 05-19-2016, 11:21 AM
stanron stanron is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JonPR View Post

That riff you mention is then a simple arpeggio of this chord: (0)-2-0-1-0-(0).
Is that 1 a typo?

Listening to it again it could just as easily be DADGAD if the timing is right.
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Old 05-19-2016, 11:44 AM
Hotspur Hotspur is offline
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I suspect it's DADGAD because there are some other runs that are easier to play in that tuning, although now I'm wondering if the one other riff where I was playing the F#-G as a hammer-on on the third string which would be easier in open D on the fourth.

I'll probably keep playing it in DADGAD regardless, since right now I only play in standard in DADGAD.

I'll tinker with it when I get home. (No guitar with me at the moment).
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Old 05-19-2016, 12:06 PM
JonPR JonPR is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hotspur View Post
I suspect it's DADGAD because there are some other runs that are easier to play in that tuning, although now I'm wondering if the one other riff where I was playing the F#-G as a hammer-on on the third string which would be easier in open D on the fourth.

I'll probably keep playing it in DADGAD regardless, since right now I only play in standard in DADGAD.

I'll tinker with it when I get home. (No guitar with me at the moment).
Yes I'd go with DADGAD capo 9; it's all under the fingers there.
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Old 05-19-2016, 12:08 PM
JonPR JonPR is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stanron View Post
Is that 1 a typo?
Not if it's in open D. It's a Gadd9 arpeggio.
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Originally Posted by stanron View Post
Listening to it again it could just as easily be DADGAD if the timing is right.
Yes, the 3rd string would be open then. (The only reason I was considering open D was because he used that on a few other tracks on London Conversation, but not DADGAD. But then if he was going to cover Davy Graham's tune he would have likely used the original DADGAD.)
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Old 05-19-2016, 05:08 PM
stanron stanron is offline
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Quote:
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Not if it's in open D. It's a Gadd9 arpeggio.
Of course. I was thinking Drop D or DADGAD and you were thinking open D.
Was 1967 too early for DADGAD?
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Old 05-19-2016, 07:22 PM
Hotspur Hotspur is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stanron View Post
Of course. I was thinking Drop D or DADGAD and you were thinking open D.
Was 1967 too early for DADGAD?
No. Graham was doing it in the early 60s.

I feel silly for not being able to figure out he was just arpeggiating that chord. I'm playing it a whole step down, though, which may have messed me up. Capo 9 is a little tight for me.

Now I've just got to be able to keep my thumb going without screwing up the rhythm of the melody part.
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  #10  
Old 05-20-2016, 02:39 AM
JonPR JonPR is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stanron View Post
Of course. I was thinking Drop D or DADGAD and you were thinking open D.
Was 1967 too early for DADGAD?
Davy Graham invented it in the early 60s, in an attempt to make guitar sound more like the oud (in fact oud is tuned differently).

His arrangement of She Moved Through the Fair was first recorded in May 1963 and issued on a compilation EP with Martin Carthy - https://carthyonline.wordpress.com/d...on-hootenanny/ (I think this is the one you can find on youtube dated (wrongly) 1962, although he may well have created the arrangement in 1962. That one is live, although the credit on the EP is ambiguous: "midnight folk concert" certainly suggests live, but no venue is mentioned.)

He played it live on UK TV in October 1963 (I found the date elsewhere), Rory McEwen's intro making his manifesto clear:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYABfZ7HMhM
(EDIT: I just checked the tuning of this version, and he's in C# but capo is on 2; that makes his open strings tuned to B F# B E F# B! In other versions it sounds as Eb, ie normal DADGAD capo 1, but possibly still capo on 2 and tuned down a half-step.)

A later bootleg live version (much longer) from 1967 was called "She Moved Through the Bizarre" - see what they did there... (He never seems to have made a studio version of it, perhaps because he regarded it as merely a prototype demo of the celtic-meets-arabic principle.)

Obviously, it's this arrangement that John Martyn borrowed, and greatly simplified. (I'm not surprised Martyn's wasn't released at the time; although it's perfectly nice - and adds the vocal - it sounds like a timid amateur cover in comparison to the original, and JM was probably keen to move on from under the shadow of his influences.)
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Last edited by JonPR; 05-20-2016 at 07:57 AM.
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Old 05-20-2016, 10:04 AM
Hotspur Hotspur is offline
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Man, watching Davy Graham after watching a lot of Martyn and Jansch ... he seems so **** serious all the time. Martyn and Jansch were having fun up there. Graham feels like he'd scold you for smiling.

I actually wanted to work out the Martyn version because it is simpler, and I want to do it with a singing friend of mine. Maybe once I get that down, I'll add more of the embellishments Graham uses.
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Old 05-20-2016, 02:22 PM
JonPR JonPR is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hotspur View Post
Man, watching Davy Graham after watching a lot of Martyn and Jansch ... he seems so **** serious all the time. Martyn and Jansch were having fun up there. Graham feels like he'd scold you for smiling.
Well, Martyn always had a lot of fun, but Jansch was pretty serious most of the time. Still, he was always more relaxed than Graham. Jansch was cool. Graham was cold - or at least looked that way: Shirley Collins said she found him intimidating.

Davy Graham could have fun (kind of) but he always had that academic approach to folk music. (He even wore bow-ties later on, like a proper old-school professor.) He was known to somewhat resent that young gun Jansch muscling in with his easy charisma, getting all the attention.
These two are quite light-hearted though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdHWPt6pHNg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZWtNYDz1So
(Mind you, someone has smacked him in the eye recently....)
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Last edited by JonPR; 05-20-2016 at 02:29 PM.
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