HOW TO PLAY THIS MONTH’S SONGS

By Jimmy Brown

“STILL LOVING YOU”

Scorpions

ONE OF THE most artfully composed power ballads from the Eighties, this dramatic song is built around a hauntingly beautiful, classical-style chord progression. It’s also one of the few popular ballads from the classic rock era that’s in a minor key. Scorpions guitarists Rudolph Schenker and Matthias Jabs, with their Gibson Flying V and Explorer guitars plugged into cranked Marshall amps, make great use of dynamic and textural contrasts and practice the lost art of rolling back the volume knobs for their instruments’ bridge pickups to around “2,” to effectively clean up their otherwise high-gain overdriven tones.

Schenker (Gtr. 1) begins the song by gently flatpicking a series of chordal arpeggios in G minor, fretting high, piano-like voicings and interjecting, at the end of the first bar, a tart melodic fill based on the G blues scale (G, Bb, C, D b , D, F), which works surprisingly well over the underlying Ebmaj7 chord, briefly implying an Eb7 sound. Notice the guitarist’s highly unusual fret-hand fingerings for the first four chords, which he chose to facilitate playing the aforementioned melodic fill while holding down the previously picked notes in the Ebmaj7 shape. If these “pretzel knot” fingerings feel too awkward to you, consider playing the chords conventionally, fretting the B-string notes with your pinkie and temporarily borrowing it to fret the first two notes of beat 4.