Is anyone else a Steely Dan fan? I have been listening to the music of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen since the seventies. If I had to pick a desert island band, it would be Steely Dan. There is so much to learn from the work of this pair. That being said, I have a love-hate relationship when it comes to learning their music. The harmonic complexity found in their songs leads to difficult to fret chord shapes. The difficulty arises from the fact that the chords are composed on a piano and then mapped to the guitar. I usually spend a few hours working on a song only to give up out of frustration of not being able to fret the more complex chords cleanly. Does anyone else struggle with the music from this band? I am beginning to wonder if my time is better spent working out easier to fret versions of the intervals.
Steely Dan
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RickP
Established 1960, Still Not Dead
Love Steely Dan. The beauty of this band is their melding of more basic music styles with jazz, using the best studio musicians, and somehow coming up with something both musically challenging and accessible/accepted by the masses at the same time. That’s one impressive accomplishment right there.
I am not a “trained” musician in that I can’t read charts and don’t have deep theory roots. I use music like this to stretch my ears and mind. I think it is some of the hardest pop music out there, but it is great fun once you get a piece of it under your fingers. Some of the songs are more timing and feel than they are musically difficult, and that’s just as beneficial to me to work on.
Most compositions based on piano chording are challenging for me, and songs by Stevie Wonder, Michael McDonald, and the like pushed me to send a lot of questions to my keyboard player to get a grasp on what they were doing. It’s a great learning experience, like playing in a band with better musicians. To quote a song lyric, “It Keeps You Running!”
I am not a “trained” musician in that I can’t read charts and don’t have deep theory roots. I use music like this to stretch my ears and mind. I think it is some of the hardest pop music out there, but it is great fun once you get a piece of it under your fingers. Some of the songs are more timing and feel than they are musically difficult, and that’s just as beneficial to me to work on.
Most compositions based on piano chording are challenging for me, and songs by Stevie Wonder, Michael McDonald, and the like pushed me to send a lot of questions to my keyboard player to get a grasp on what they were doing. It’s a great learning experience, like playing in a band with better musicians. To quote a song lyric, “It Keeps You Running!”
11top
Cousin Eddie's cousin
I’m a SD fan (The band 
). Like a bunch, but that first record with Reelin’ in the Years and Dirty Work is special.
). Like a bunch, but that first record with Reelin’ in the Years and Dirty Work is special.jxe
babe en der wood
someone’s mom made out with donald fagen back in the day; says he had a big tongue.
alantig
Zombie Four, DFZ
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Love Steely Dan, haven't tried to learn any of their stuff yet, and I really should. One of the UK guitar mags has a Kid Charlemagne transcription, but whether it'll still be there when the stores reopen here is up for debate. The tone on the Reelin' In The Years solo is killer.
The songs “Reelin’ In the Years” an “Dirty Work” are on “Can’t Buy a Thrill.” Elliot Randall played the solo on “Reelin’ in the Years.” David Palmer was the lead vocalist on “Dirty Work.” He was not in the lineup for very long. However, then again neither were Denny Diaz and Skunk Baxter.
Believe it or not, charts are not that difficult to read. They are just the chord numbers within any key. Charts have the advantage of allowing musicians to transpose key. For example, the I, IV, V chords in G are G, C, and D. Transposing to A, they A, D, and E. Minor chords a notated using lowercase Roman numerals. For example, the i, iv, and v chords in the key of Em (G’s relative minor) are Em, Am, and Bm. Here’s an interesting tidbit. Any minor 7th chord contains the notes in the minor chord and its relative major. For example, Em7 contains the notes E, G, B, and D. The note E is the tonic (root). The note G is the minor third,. The note D is the perfect fifth, and D is the minor seventh in Em7 However, if we separate the notes from G out, we get the tonic G. The note B is the major third from G, and the note D is the perfect fifth of G. The difference between a minor and major chord is the number of half steps (notes) between the tonic and the third.
By the way, the simplest fingering of Em7 is to fret the second fret of the A string and strum all 6 strings. In that fingering, the open 6th string is E. The second fret on the A string is B. After that, we have open D, open G, open B, and open E. The notes in Em7 are are E, G, B, and D. That’s why it is an Em7 chord. Any chord can be played anywhere on the neck as long as one knows the notes in the chord. The CAGED system is completely unnecessary and will eventually land one in a cage.
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RickP
Established 1960, Still Not Dead
Thanks for sharing. I can follow numbers, like the Nashville system and know scale intervals, but if someone sits an actual staff-notated chart in front of me, I’m asking someone for directions pretty quickly. I am working on bettering my knowledge, but have an appreciation for those who can both play charts fluidly, and improvise when called on to do so. I’ve used some of the Caged method, and I think it has a place as far as one of many ways of visualizing the fretboard. In the end, it’s down to me. I just need to put more time into that side of playing. All good. You have to have goals!
When think of charts, I think Nashville charts. I played with a few groups where someone brought Nashville charts to a practice. Now, staffed sheet music is an entirely different animal. I can read, but I never play using staffed sheet music. It just does not map to the guitar very well. My girlfriend plays piano. She asked if I would give her a lesson on a Chuck Levin’s 60th Anniversary Stratocaster I purchased last year that I named “Candy.” I did one better and gave her Candy with a lesson. She plays piano using sheet music, so she asked me where middle C exists on a guitar. When I told her that exists in multiple places, she said “That’s why guitarists rarely use sheet music.”
Alnus Rubra
Loving nature’s wonders
SD fan here!
Started out with Donald Fagens - Night Fly in the 80’s and went backwards!
Bhodisattva is one of my favourites, I can play quite a bit of that one!
Started out with Donald Fagens - Night Fly in the 80’s and went backwards!
Bhodisattva is one of my favourites, I can play quite a bit of that one!
sergiodeblanc
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I can’t resist mellow electric piano and clavinets.
Thinking of alternate chord voicings, the Edgar Winter tune “Free Ride” is a good example. If one watches the song being played, the opening funky riff looks like Em7 with a slide up to F#m7 because the chord shape is Am7 barred on the 7th and 9th frets. However, if one listens closely, the root notes E and F# from Em7 and F#m7 are omitted in the strumming pattern, as it only contains the D, G, and B strings on a standard tuned guitar. What this technique gives us when the Am7 chord shape is barred at the 7th and 9th frets are the notes B,D,G and C#, E, A. These notes are the first inversions of G and A, respectively (i.e., G is relative major of Em and A is the relative major of F#m). For those who do not know. An inverted chord is a chord where the root (tonic) note is not in the bass of the chord. The partial strumming of chords is fairly common in funk. Nile Rodgers is the king of this technique.
D
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I love Steely Dan. Always have. One of the things I love about them, is the way they play a melody by modulating chords. Jazz chords are the coolest chords ever. The problem, for me, is I’m not good at switching complex chords like that. I think it’s beautiful, but I’m not good at it. Just a skill set I never focused on. I have a better chance of nailing an Yngwie solo than I do of playing the rhythm part on many Steely Dan songs.
The harmonic complexity (chord complexity) is what sets Steely Dan apart from most other mainstream artists. I have always thought that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were the driving force behind this complexity. However, if one listens to Steely Dan's earlier records, one finds that they are closer to mainstream rock than what followed on the later albums. Things really changed after Becker and Fagen started to use Larry Carlton. The songs that a lot of guitarists attempt to learn were performed by mostly by Carlton with "Kid Charlemagne" being his masterpiece. The song "Josie" is another example of Carlton's work. The chords in that song are a farther reach for most non-jazz guitarists than is the solo. That's because Carlton play rhythm on that song whereas the solo was recorded by Walter Becker. The last three chords in the opening riff are not common chord shapes for your average rock and blues player. I watched a YouTube video this morning where Rick Beato interviewed Larry Carlton at the Baked Potato. That interview kind of demystified Steely Dan from the "Royal Scam" forward. Carlton talks about his eureka moment with polychords during the interview. If one watches how he fingers chords, it is clear that he has been playing chords this way most of his life.
With that said, Peter Frampton is a guitarist that people underestimate. The album "Frampton Comes Alive" was huge when I was learning how to play guitar. His solos were a complete mystery to me because unlike most of his other British contemporaries, Frampton's influences were jazz guys. He mixes stuff common in bebop with the standard pentatonic stuff that other British guitarists were playing.
Nile Rodgers is yet another underestimated guitarist with jazz roots. He is not popular with guitarists because he plays rhythm guitar almost exclusively, but the harmonic complexity of his songs demonstrates that he knows exactly what he is doing.
With that said, Peter Frampton is a guitarist that people underestimate. The album "Frampton Comes Alive" was huge when I was learning how to play guitar. His solos were a complete mystery to me because unlike most of his other British contemporaries, Frampton's influences were jazz guys. He mixes stuff common in bebop with the standard pentatonic stuff that other British guitarists were playing.
Nile Rodgers is yet another underestimated guitarist with jazz roots. He is not popular with guitarists because he plays rhythm guitar almost exclusively, but the harmonic complexity of his songs demonstrates that he knows exactly what he is doing.
jxe
babe en der wood
sergiodeblanc
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Totally. That kind of “advanced rhythm guitar” is what brought me back to loving and practicing guitar. I kinda plateaued with metal and solos around the late 90’s, and started to play other instruments and get more into production thinking I was “done” leaning guitar... how wrong I was.
sergiodeblanc
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Steve's addiction
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SD is my favorite band. If I heard right, in the doc about the Aja album, some of the chords stretched their hands so far it took 2 players to play the complete chord.
D
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