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By Pete Madsen
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Venture into the warm waters of surf guitar and ace these classic, fun-to-play licks. With audio examples
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| JUSTIN VANDEGRIFT says that surfing has a big influence on his guitar playing. “The two go hand in hand,” he says, “Like coming home after a powerful surf session and playing some guits on the sofa while my son bangs on his bongo.” Photo by Anne Hamersky.
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Practice Plan:
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Surf guitar is played fast, but you don’t need to play it that way from the get-go. Use a metronome and start slow, around 80 bpm. Gradually bump up your speed, eventually aiming for the neighborhood of 170 bpm. Be patient. It might take a while to get there, but the speed you build will pay off in all the music you play.
Play It: “Wipeout!” (page 48, Summer 2007)
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Tune Up
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The cool ocean breeze weaves through the palm trees on a Southern California afternoon, and your board slices through the tube on your last wave of the day. As you towel off on the beach, the sun drying your tanned skin, and head home in your woody station wagon, you reflect on the perfect endless summer.
OK, so maybe you don’t surf or live anywhere near a coastline. No matter; grab a guitar, plug in, and immerse yourself in the sounds of surf guitar.
Surf music was introduced in the early 1960s with the music of Dick Dale, the Lively Ones, the Bobby Fuller Four, and a host of others who plugged in their Fender Stratocasters and Jaguars, turned their reverb way up, and proceeded to double-pick their way into surf-guitar heaven. The music they played was pumped with adrenaline and evoked the California dream of long summer days, cool nights, fast hot rods, and the perfect wave. But just a few years later, British Invasion bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones left surf in their wake, until Pulp Fiction and its soundtrack, featuring Dick Dale’s “Miserlou,” helped bring it back into the mainstream.
With a structure based on 12-bar blues and evocative Latin- and Middle Eastern–inspired melodies, surf music has a cool, mysterious sound yet is surprisingly easy to play. We’ll focus on lead playing in this lesson, but listen to the rhythm guitar and drums on some of the songs in “The Big Kahunas of Surf Guitar” (below) to get a clear understanding of the surf sound. To really get the surf-guitar tone, play these examples on an electric guitar and crank up the reverb on your amp.
Get the Key Surf Sounds
Reverb-drenched lead lines, played staccato (so the notes are clipped, rather than ringing out), are integral to this style’s sound. In EYE OF THE PYRAMID, below, we have a lead line like that from the Pyramids’ hit “Penetration.” Try playing this single-string descending melody with all downstrokes. For the first measure, use your fretting-hand ring finger to play the descending line. When you get to the second measure, use your index and ring fingers to play the back-and-forth phrase on the third and fifth frets, then slide those fingers down quickly to get the last notes on the first and third frets.
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Eye of the Pyramid
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