[imported_doa]

I am charting a song with a lot of whammy bar on guitar so I thought I would check out Reign In Blood to see how it was handled there – only to find that it wasn’t tackled at all.

 

Nevertheless I was interested in the charting and decided to take a look at one of the simpler power chord sections because it had gems that I thought were not strictly ‘power chord’ gems (so I wanted to look at why it was charted the way it was).

 

This is the tab for the section in question:

 

 

If I wasn’t taking the speed of the song into account and just straight up charted it I would do something like this.

 

 

But of course that’s not very playable at slayer speed.

 

This is the chart from the RB3 FC video that I watched:

 

 

Initially what struck me as odd was the red orange for a power chord. Yeah, I’m a noob. But after that I wasn’t sure about keeping red and orange two times in a row for the first two descending chords – or the fact that the first pair of chords are closer together in the chart that the second pair. Musically the second pair if chords are closer together. But the difference between the first chords of each pairing does capture the descending motion.

 

Visually looking at the chart I might have done something more like this:

 

 

Not sure about the repeating red blue in this one.

 

And playing around on my plastic guitar I came up with a version that pivoted off the yellow gem, like this:

 

 

What I liked about this was the clearly descending chord pattern.

 

Messing around with charts is all good and fun but the proof is in the playing.

 

So what did I learn after playing all of these variations? Well the official chart does mimic the power chord sliding through having to shift hand position up and down a couple of times. And I think that was the thing that swung it for me. I was nicely surprised that even though initially I didn’t like how the chart looked it was the most interesting to play, out of the other variations that I came up with. I also found a scenario for chord variation that I hadn’t really considered before, so it was definitely worth it from that perspective.

 

Well I’m not sure if this kind of post interests that vast majority of you guys, but I thought I would post this anyway as I am still learning the ropes

[akaisenshi]

The very bottom one showing the clearly descending chord pattern seems the most accurate to me. In my opinion, patterns played in Rock Band should seem pretty natural if you know the song on a real guitar perhaps, so pretty much giving each chord their own gem identity is the way to go.

[imported_doa]

I guess I should just stick to what I am doing then, I was just feeling like the charts that I am working on are not as exotic as other charts that I see because I’m working with 100% power chords basically. So I end up with my whole chart just being limited to the basic shapes like in in the last image in my post (which means some gem pairings get repeated a lot through different riffs).

 

Also no point making things harder to play than necessary.

[akaisenshi]

Also no point making things harder to play than necessary.

Bingo.

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