Playing Opeth's 'Weakness'

This is a hauntingly beautiful track that is suprisingly easy to play to. I say play 'to' because although there are very simple elements that you can play, there are lots of subtleties in it that are hard to pick up and it's almost impossible to find accurate tabs for them. A lot of it is also played on a keyboard, despite it's guitar-like sound. For now I'm just going to show you a couple of riffs that are easy to practice that sound great.

First of all I'm going to tell you the settings I have on my Line6, because you need quite a long eerie sound to come out of your guitar to make this sound right. You can practice it without of course, but it won't sound as close to the real thing.
The sound I get with the following settings isn't exactly as it sounds in the song, but it's as close as I could get and it still sounds great.

Settings

• Amp Model: Clean (you could try Blues, but I found this makes the notes sound a bit too strong)
• Drive: Full (This doesn't mean the sound is very distorted, it just makes the notes a bit 'fuzzy' as the model is set to a clean sound.)
• Bass: 4 (10'o'clock on the dial)
• Mid: 9.5 (4'o'clock)
• Treble: 9.5 (4'o'clock)
• First Dial: No effect
• Second Dial: Delay effect
• Reverb: 11 (5'o'clock)

Ok so here's the song...



The riffs we're going to be playing come in at about 58 seconds in.
Here's the tab:

e|--------------------------------------------------------|
B|--7-7-7-7-7/8-------7-7-7-7-7/8--\5-----7-7-7-7-7/8-----|
G|---------------4-------------------------------------4--|
D|--------------------------------------------------------|
A|--------------------------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------------------------|

You will see there is some sliding to be done (the / symbol) but it's very simple in this song. I have found that it helps to pick the string, slide, and then pick the second string as well. You can try just picking and sliding without playing the second note if you want but I find it's harder.

There's then this very similar part...

The seven right before the slide is a really quick one, almost a grace or ghost note. <-- According to the person who write this tab.

>e|-------------------------------------------------------|
B|--7-7-7-7-7-7/8-8/10------------------------------------|
G|--------------------------------------------------------|
D|--------------------------------------------------------|
A|--------------------------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------------------------|

This piece is great for practicing very gentle picking and when you feel confident also for sliding (without picking the second note). I can't find a video of someone practicing this, so enjoy this live performance by Opeth themselves.

Playing The White Stripe's 'Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground' Intro

The actual notes in this are really easy to play, it's more about timing. This is a great piece of music to practice when you want to rock out a bit as you can crank the distortion up and even bend the strings a bit if you want to. It only uses ONE string, so you don't have to worry about moving your fingers about too much.
Here's the song:



The tab is as follows (I found several that were really badly written, so I wrote this myself):

e|-------------------------------------------|
B|-------------------------------------------|
G|-------------------------------------------|
D|-------------------------------------------|
A|-------------------------------------------|
E|-5---5--5-0-3---3--3-0-2--2-0-1--1-0-5---5-|

On the second time through I think there is a tiny bit of bending on the first note. You can hear it in the song

Here's a video of someone playing this on an acoustic guitar.



He skips the '0's in the tab above, well actualy he doesn't skip them, he plays them on the same fret rather than open. So the first '0' in the tab above would be a 5, the second would be a 3, the third would be a 2 etc
This is easier but doesn't sound as good IMO. Give it a go if you find my version a bit tricky.

Playing Metallica's 'Enter Sandman' Intro

This is a short and easy intro followed by a guitar trick that's quite hard to pull off (I haven't really got it down yet). Enter Sandman is a great song that's very popular (and a bit overplayed!). Here it is incase you're a complete phillistine.
;)




The tab for the intro is:

e|------------------|
B|------0-----------|
G|------------------|
D|----7-------------|
A|--------------7---|
E|--0-----6--5------|

Easy enough. =) Here's the difficult part (for me at least:

e|------------------------------------------|
B|------------------------------------------|
G|------------------------------------------|
D|------------------------------------------|
A|-2/7----------------2/7-------------------|
E|-----0-0-0-0-0-0-0------0-0-0-0-0-0-0-----|

You may not have seen a forward-slash in tab before - what this means is that you slide from the first fret written to the second. So in this case you start with your finger on the second fret, pluck the string and then slide your finger down to the 7th fret really fast. It's easy to do, but hard to make it sound right. After that it's just a case of plucking the top string.

Here's a good video that shows you how to play both these parts (and the entire song), it actually includes the tab at the bottom right of the video too so you can see what parts he's playing. The actual instructions start at about 1:10 into the video, after he's finished a short demonstration.



Good luck with that, the first part is good easy practice and the second should push you a bit.

Playing Opeth's 'In My Time of Need' Intro

This is a great bit of music for practicing (and a great song!). The first part of the intro is very easy, and the second bit is quite tough and good for stretching your fingers.

Here's the song. Unlike 'Come As You Are' you are probably not familiar with it unless you are into this genre of music, so take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with it. The 'easy' part is played in the first 25 seconds. 25-27 seconds is the tricky part. To put it into perspective the intro riff is 8 notes played over about 3 1/2 seconds, whereas the second is 9 notes played in just under 2 seconds. I still can't play the second riff as fast as it is played in the song, so I wouldn't worry if you can't get it right straight away. =P



Here's the tab for the first riff which is played 7 times at the beginning of the song and also used later on:

e|----------0--------|
B|--------7---7------|
G|------0-------0----|
D|----7-----------7--|
A|-------------------|
E|--0----------------|

Nice and easy, as you don't have to move your fingers on the fret board at all. I am not sure whether you should pluck all the strings downwards or get the last three on the way back up, but I find the former easier as I'm not great at strumming/plucking upwards yet!

The more difficult part:

e|----------0---3------|
B|------1-----1-----1--|
G|----4---4-------4----|
D|---------------------|
A|--0------------------|
E|---------------------|

I put my pinky finger on the fourth fret of G and my index finger on the first fret of B. On the 7th note I use my ring finger to hold the top e string at the third fret.

Here's a video of someone playing the song, if it helps you to see someone else play it.



I'm not at a level where I can play the whole song yet, mainly because that second intro riff is tricky and my fingers don't like stretching that far more long enough to practice it a lot, but if you feel you are ready the whole tab can be found here.

Playing Nirvana's 'Come As You Are' Intro

So it's just over two weeks since I started practicing, and I thought I'd get into some of the things I've been working on. First off is the song in the post title, which I mentioned in my 'Tablature' post. It's not the easiest intro I've been playing but it is amongst them and unlike the others it's reasonably long (15 notes). You also don't have to worry too much about the tuning, as standard tuning sounds close enough for casual practice. It's played suprisingly fast in the song, but you can work up to that speed as it sounds fine played at a slower speed.

Here's the song:


This is the tab for the intro - if you can learn this you can play the first 50 seconds of the song! As I said in one of my previous posts, the first '0' is only played the first time around, after that you begin at the second '0' after the second line.

d|--|-------------------------------------------------------------| 
A|--|-------------------------------------------------------------|
F|--|-------------------------------------------------------------|  
E|--|-------------------------------------------------------------|
G|--|-------0---0---------2-----2---------------------------------| 
D|-0|0-1-2---2---2-2-1-0---0-0------------------------------------|

If you are having difficulty try watching the video below. Normally by themselves there aren't too helpful, but combined with the tab above you should have a good idea of what's going on. Bear in mind he is playing with standard tuning, which is why it sounds a bit higher pitched than in the video above. If you tune your guitar as shown on the left hand side of the tab above then it will sound better.



I won't post the tab for the entire song because I can't find one that actually plays right (even the one that I took the intro from). I used this song to practice plucking the strings without looking at them (as it's only the top two strings this is nice and easy), to get used to switching fingers/frets and to practice keeping a rhythm.

So I definitely recommend starting with this if you want to get straight into playing a song! I'll post up some of the other ones I've been trying to play soon.

The First Songs I'm Learning to Play

So I thought I'd share with you what songs I'm using to help me practice at the moment.

They are:

• Come As You Are - Nirvana
• Enter Sandman - Metallica
• Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground - The White Stripes
  
• One - Metallica
• Death Whispered a Lullaby - Opeth
  
• Pull Me Under - Dream theatre
• Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes
  
• Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
• In My Time of Need - Opeth
  

I chose most of these because I'm very familiar with them and how they should sound, because they all have intros which are playable at beginner level, and because they were the easiest to find tabs and practice videos for (i.e. people playing them on youtube). I'd love it if you could send me some more!

Tablature

I'll keep this relatively brief, as I'm only familiar with the basics.

Tabs are a form of musical notation that tell you where to place your fingers (rather than just telling you what to play, like sheet music, tabs also tell you how to play it). It looks similar to sheet music too, to the untrained eye.

Tabs are written like this:

e|--------------------------------|
B|--------------------------------|
G|--------------------------------|
D|--------------------------------|
A|--------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------| <-- Thickest (top) string

Each line represents a string, with the bottom line representing the top string. This sounds counterintuitive, but makes sense, considering the top string is closest to you (or, your eyes at least) when you are playing. The letters on the left indicate what note that string should be tuned to. Different songs require different tuning.

Here is the tab for the intro to 'Come As You Are' by Nirvana, which is nice and simple:

d|--|-------------------------------------------------------------| 
A|--|-------------------------------------------------------------|
F|--|-------------------------------------------------------------|  
E|--|-------------------------------------------------------------|
G|--|-------0---0---------2-----2---------------------------------| 
D|-0|0-1-2---2---2-2-1-0---0-0------------------------------------|

As you can see immediately the letters on the left are different to those above, because this song requires different tuning. You will also note there are numbers on two of the 'strings', ranging from 0 to 2.
The number corresponds to the fret that that note is played on. So 1 = first fret, 2 = second fret etc. 0 denotes an 'open' string, meaning that you do not hold it at any fret, or indeed at all.
There is also a second line right after the first note is played - whoever wrote this tab put that there to remind us that in this song that first note is only played the first time, so after that we start from that line rather than the first one.
So, the above tab means:

"Pluck the top string (D) 'open' twice, then once at the first fret, and once again at the second fret. Then pluck the second string (G) 'open' once, the first string (D) on the second fret, second string (G) open again, first string (D) second fret twice, then first fret and then open. Then the second string (G) on the second fret, the first string (D) open twice and then finally the second string (G) on the second fret again."

You can see why it was necessary to find a way of writing how to play that was shorter than that!
There are plenty of other symbols you can find on tabs, but as a beginner I don't really need to worry about them yet.

Hopefully that should be enough for you to get started. If you want to read more on tabs check out the following links:

• Wikipedia entry (guitar tablature is half-way down the page)
• How To Read Guitar Tabs (more detail)
  

You can find thousands of tabs online, some easier to read and play than others. Try googling some of your favorite songs!