Redding had produced (and co-written) Arthur Conley’s hit “Sweet Soul Music” earlier that year and Cropper says he started talking about getting off the road and spending more time producing in the studio. He had always relied on the emotion and energy in his vocals to carry his songs, but now he started paying more mind to the words themselves he’d also recorded most of his songs live in the studio, but the complex layering achieved by the Beatles and George Martin clued him in to other ways of building tracks. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band over and over. Redding had begun listening to Bob Dylan, whom he’d met at the Whisky in ’66 but beginning in June, the singer – like the rest of the world – was playing Sgt. It was the only time I told Otis what to do.” I suggested he write something folk-like, saying we could call it Soul Folk. “He saw a huge crowd of white kids going nuts over him, and he began to believe he could follow in the footsteps of Sam Cooke and Ray Charles.”Īl Bell, then a Stax executive, says that he told Redding he was getting pegged as a genre musician and “would have to come up with something different. And then we practice putting it together.“Monterey had a powerful effect on Otis,” recalls Stanley Booth, who interviewed Redding for the Saturday Evening Post during those final sessions. I have an easy F chord that I show you, you’re welcome to use either that or the F bar chord.Įither way, we practice through every single section of this song intro, verse, chorus bridge outro. And we also have to deal with a barre chord, the F chord.
We do this just by using the first half, down down-up, on each of the two shapes within the measure. First of all, we’re splitting measures, meaning we have to split our strumming pattern among two chord shapes. Not too much needs to be said about that, but the bridge does have a couple things we need to take a look at. The chorus is very, very straightforward.
We talk about how to count it out, learn how to play it, and then we move on and learn the rest of the tune. It’s a 16th note pattern, it’s twice as dense as the other one. I don’t recommend using this one if it’s a solo performance but if you do play with a band, this pattern is the one that they use and it sounds great.
Then we practice putting it together with the chord shapes.Īfter that, just for completion sake, I’ve included another strumming pattern that you hear the guitar playing on the recording. My biggest advice is to learn how to say it, that’s going to get you there the fastest if you are having trouble with stuff like this. It’s the most common strumming pattern ever. We talk a little bit about switching between them and how to practice that effectively and then we play them in order, using downstrokes only, just to get the counting right.Īfter that, we take a look at a strumming pattern. The lesson starts off with the chords needed to play the verse: G, B7, C, A7. But even then, I will show you a simpler way to do it so that will be possible. Even if you’re fairly new to guitar, you could play each section of this song, except probably the bridge. It’s a classic strummer made up of some pretty simple components and a great opportunity to work on some lesser practiced chord switches, like from G to B7 for instance.