BUMP AND BIND
VIDEO MASTERCLASS Shane Theriot
In this instalment of GT’s popular Star Video feature, US session guitar ace Shane Theriot performs and discusses his tasty solo over Jason’s funk-rock track, Bump And Bind. Jon Bishop is your guide.
This month we welcome Shane Therio, best-known for his work with Hall & Oates and the TV show Live From Daryl’s House, hosted by Daryl Hall and featuring guest artists like Billy Gibbons and Joe Walsh. He has also toured and recorded with New Orleans legends such as Dr John and The Neville Brothers. For this feature, Jason Sidwell recorded a new piece for him, Bump And Bind. Shane then filmed himself soloing over it and discussed how he approached his performance, highlighting notable aspects of his playing style.
The track starts out in the key of E Minor and there is a pre-recorded riff to navigate. Shane went for a fingerstyle approach, which provided dynamic and intervallic freedom, such as the use of arpeggios and chord tones to navigate around Jason’s riff.
Worthy of note is that Shane tastefully superimposes some colourful chords over the riff in E. He also uses his Boss vibrato pedal which provides his performance with a unique and pleasing timbre.
The pre-chorus section moves to C, and to navigate the changes Shane came up with a motif via singing. Singing ideas can help remove the constraints of fretboard patterns and keep the results musical and relatable. There are many different options of things to play over a track like this, but the big takeaway is to try singing the ideas first. He used this same process for the chorus, which shifts to A Minor. This time he opted for the arpeggios of the chords with which to create his next memorable melody.
In verse four Shane opens things out with an improvised solo. The main scale of choice here is E Minor Pentatonic (E-G-A-B-D). As you’ll no doubt know, you can add the Diminished 5th interval (here, Bb) to E Minor Pentatonic to create the E Blues scale (E-G-A-Bb-B-D). What’s more, you can spice things up another way by bringing in the Major 2nd (F#) and Major 6th (C#), and this gives us E Dorian mode (E-F#-G-A-C#-B-D) which works over all the chords in the section. Add your b5 (Bb) to this to get an extremely versatile set of notes.