Dropped D tuning study
Summers End - Part II

Listen to a mp3 of Summers End with slide guitar playing an improvised melody line.

Here is the second half of Summer's End. If you missed the first half, click here.

Don't forget, this is in dropped D tuning. Lower that bass string from E to D. Check it with the D string, make sure it's tuned.

You'll find the second half of this is more of a finger picking pattern than the first half. You'll see in the movie that it revolves around a few basic chord shapes.

The first is a kind of Bm, but I let the open G string ring as well, turning the Bm into an add13 (according to GuitarPro's chord diagram). It allows two notes one semitone apart to ring together, something considered to be clashing. In this case though, it sounds "right", because that was the effect I was looking for.

The second chord is exactly the same as the first, only the bass note is an E, not a B. This simple switching of bass notes turns the Bm into an Em, with the open G string now becoming the 9. So it's an Em9.

Of course, none of these can really be considered chords (except the very end bit), since I'm picking the notes separately (arpeggiating), but it's much easier to see those notes as belonging to the chords. You'll also see how the open strings come into play in the melody. Notes seems to appear out of nowhere in bars 7 and 8. That's a little 4 note figure that uses two open strings.

Notice also the very distinct bass line underpinning the whole piece. Really try to stress those thumb notes.

Here is the tablature (above are the midi files generated by the tablature program):

Don't forget, if you're still looking for the trick to seeing how the music lays itself out the length of the fretboard, PlaneTalk -- The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book teaches a very simple way of keeping track of it all, whether chords, melody or harmony. It's a simple visualization technique, using something we all learned the very first day we heard about chords.

Read more about PlaneTalk here.

Happy twangin'

Kirk