Rockin' with The Angels

Playing Aussie rock covers fits in well with a pub scene in Australia, I have a number I bring out but you can never have enough Aussie rock.  The Angels "Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again?" is an absolute classic with it's MA+ call-response titular question, so it is obvious arrangement material. I had tried a few times over the years, but it hasn't been until now that I considered I had the skills to take it on.

It's pretty much all power chords, with that standard blues rock perfect fifth-major sixth rollicking riff underpinning everything, so that had to be prominent. In E, it's pretty easy, the bassline looks like this:

-2--2--4--2--2--2--4--2-
-0-----0-----0-----0----

That however uses up too much left hand, and is a real drag to do for long periods of time. It would be very difficult to put a melody over that. But since Drop D tuning has been my best friend for a long time now, the riff in Drop D will become:

-0--0--2--0--0--0--2--0-
-0-----0-----0-----0----

Much better!

The overall structure is a twelve bar blues chord progression so going from the E to the A means going up the neck rather than to the next strings, to keep the Drop D working, but that is fine.  I wanted to keep the key in E, so putting a capo on the second fret brought the Drop D back to E.

So now for the melody on top:

------------------------|------------
------------------------|------------
-------2-----0--------0-|------------
-------------------4----|----4-----0-
----0--2--0-----0--2--0-|----0--2--0-
-0-----0-----0-----0----|-0-----0----
       went  down  to san    ta    fe

Strumming the bass line would work to get the bass note on each beat and then the 5th-6th interval would be every 8th note, but I find strumming bass note chord fragments clumbsy. It might be the classical guitarist in me coming out - there are a few songs I play that I need to strum two or more bass strings, it forces your wrist down close against the soundboard to get the right angle, and this starts limiting what your fingers can do. You could train yourself to play fluently like that...or pluck the 5th string with alternating index-middle fingers.  Which is what I did.

And now, your annular (ring) finger can pluck the melody.  This is kinda hard, and the 4th string gets a lot of sympathetic vibration (and the odd accidental pluck) but it's completely in chord (the octave!) so it's okay.  I find I can't play right hand middle and annular fingers where the strings aren't next to each other, so my index finger gets busy on the riff when I'm picking the melody, but then reverts to index-middle when there's no melody.

You will have to mentally disconnect your ring finger because the melody is not on always on beat. The first three syllables "went down to" are all on beat, but "san ta fe" is all offbeat.  This is challenging, especially because the riff is always on-beat!  But, playing through slowly and then speeding up once you have made the mental adjustment does the trick.

It's another song that was a bit too rough for my youtube channel - too fast, bad picking - still needs work, but have a look, tell me what you think! :-)