This really is a bit of guitar history. Fantastic solo. I used to teach this back at The Guitar Institute, but re-visiting it for this lesson reminded me how deep this solo is and how many subtle inflections there are to get down... seems every time I hear it I notice nore tasty bits to try and work in.

The intro was out of focus cos I hit the wrong button and didn't realise until after I had done all the audio and well, just couldn't be re-doing the whole things again... the main lesson is fine of course!

Video Lesson

Backing Track, Chord Sequence and harmonic devices

Is an 8 Bar Blues. Bars 5-8 have two chords per bar.

You can play Minor Penatatonic over the whole thing, or Major Pentatonic or chord tones.

If you go for chord tones, the A, D and E would all take dominant arpeggios, the diminished takes a diminished arpeggio and the minors would take min7 arpreggios.

Gear used

Settings shown as clock face (like 9' is 9 o'clock) or numbers if the unit has them on!

1. 1979 Les Paul Gold Top. Bridge Pickup*, all knobs on full.
2. Suhr Badger 30 Amp: Power 2, Drive 6, Bass 4, Middle 4, Treble 6, Gain 6.
< in effects loop>
3. Strymon Blue Sky Reverb pedal, "normal", "room", Decay 12', Mix 9', Low Damp 2', Pre Delay 10', High Damp 12'
<back to amp>
6. Dr. Z Best 2 x 12 Speak box.
7. Sure 57 microphone
8. Neve 1073 Pre Amp, EQ flat.
9. Pro Tools HD 24/96k.

Backing track was just simple thing programmed in ProTools using Superiour Drummer and some bass plug in I can't recall, built into ProTools.

* I was having a hard time deciding between the bridge and middle position of the pickup... but decoded bridge was closest, but who knows?

Extra Bits

My buddy David Mead just emailed me with some interesting notes about the guitar sound.

All this is © David Mead.

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I saw on FB that you're doing 'Need Your Love...' by Fleetwood Mac. Quick story: there's an awful lot of fuss made about the fact that Peter's guitar had the neck pick-up reversed and the myth still goes that he rewired it so it was out of phase – but as far as I know this is completely wrong. I interviewed Peter years ago and he said that all he did was take the pick-up out and accidentally put it back in the wrong way around. He didn't rewire it. As we know, you don't have to take the pick-up out to work on the wiring.

Furthermore, when Gary Moore was recording the album 'Blues For Greeny' he asked me to write the CD cover notes and also invited me up to the studios (Sarm West in London) to hear some mixes. When I got there, the Peter Green Les Paul was in the studio on a stand and I asked Gary if I could play it. When I did so two things struck me: firstly it was the lightest Les Paul I've ever picked up and secondly it had the so called 'out of phase' sound acoustically.

So my take on the whole Peter Green 'magic' Les Paul sound is that he had a very rare, light and naturally nasal/honky sounding instrument. All he had to do was add his genius and there was his sound. Just to back this up further, I don't think Gary ever managed to achieve the same sound with that guitar. In his hands it sounded different, but not the same

So many pick-up manufacturers make a special 'Peter Green Set' with an out of phase wiring configuration when it just wasn't the case. I'm sure Gary [Moore] told me that they weren't out of phase as well.

Gary bought that Les Paul for £120 – Peter wouldn't take any more for it, he just wanted it to go to a good home. It was also involved in a car accident while Gary had it where the neck was broken and had to be repaired by putting a steel bolt in the neck.

This is an excerpt from the interview I did with Peter, talking about the Les Paul.

"I didn't have it rewired, it's just backwards, that's all. I didn't use the neck pickup very much and so for some reason I took it off. I can't remember why. I played it for a while with only one pickup but when I put it back on, I just put it on backwards with the screws pointing towards to the tailpiece instead of near the neck."
But surely the wiring was reversed at some point?
"No, it's just on backwards, that's all," he insists. But this really turns things around - where does the out-of-phase sound come from?
"People keep telling me about this out-of-phase thing but I don't know anything about it. It was just round the wrong way. If you take the cover off there are two pickups underneath which look like Strat pickups close together, but I didn't touch those. It must have been like that already..."

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Thanks David!!

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