HOW TO PLAY THIS MONTH’S SONGS

By Jimmy Brown

“IT’S AMOOT POINT”

Melanie Faye

THIS SUBLIMELY SOULFUL r&b song showcases finger-style electric guitar sensation Melanie Faye’s highly creative and inventive approaches to composition and technique, as well as her musical depth and tasteful note choices for voicing chords and playing melodies.

The guitarist crafted most of the song’s parts by spinning colorful variations on the four-chord progression introduced in bars 1 and 2. No doubt inspired in part by Jimi Hendrix’s elegantly melodic rhythm playing and Stevie Wonder’s sparse but harmonically rich keyboard chord voicing approach, she mostly eschews the redundant octave doubling of standard barre chords. Instead, Melanie favors economical and sometimes angular interval stacks that highlight the chord’s essential root and major or minor 3rd, along with upper-structure chord tones, such as the 7th and 9th, while mostly avoiding the 5th, which is superfluous in this jazz-informed style.