Smiths On Guitar: Daniel Earwicker

Showing posts with label Daniel Earwicker. Show all posts

Girl Afraid

"I had just got back from New York and was obsessed with Little Richard. I just kept thinking, 'What'd sound like Little Richard on guitar?', which is how I came up with it."

"I started to think about piano melodies. For example, Girl Afraid, which is an extra track on the Heaven Knows single; I started off playing 'pidgin' piano in the studio one day and transferred it to guitar. When I wrote the song I was conscious that it should have a fast New Orleans piano part. It turned into a Kinks-style, real 60's erratic drum beat bop, which is fine but it started off as a piano part!"

- Johnny Marr

Girl Afraid is one of my favorite Smiths songs. The intro is just jaw-dropping in it's virtuosity, and I love the way it just ramps up from an awesome intro, to a menacing verse riff, to the amazing harmonized chorus chords/riffs. It's like packing 3-4 songs worth of great riffs into a single 2 minute song.

I have uploaded 2 Guitar Pro tab files here.

Here is the complete score from the "Louder Than Bombs:Off The Record" book:

Here are the chords from the Complete Chord Songbook:

Here's Daniel Earwickers first attempt, on a Rick 12 string:

Here's his second, which he does in more of an "instructional" style. Really cool! We could definately use some more videos like this:

ResidentSmith78 does a good attempt here. It's rough in a few places, but one thing to note is that he starts the riff at the 3rd fret, which is what Johnny does.

Here is a really awesome version by markpaterson, on a strat through a JC-120:

Here's a full length(!) cover by isisluna23:

adameater does a slowed down, step by step lesson here:

His full version is here:

moz77 does a slowed down version here:

barjabulon does a great job here, and the camera angle is perfect:

Here's his slowed-down tutorial of the intro:

Masterful version by johnnymare:

And here is viniciuskiko, with a cool version of Rourke's bass part:

Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others

"The song, as it was, just faded in, so i thought we had to do something a bit more interesting. Basically, I put all the reverb on the drums up so it sounded like it was coming in from some large hall, then faded it down really quickly. Then I took all the reverb back off and faded it up again. The effect was supposed to be like the musics in a hall somewhere, it goes away, then it comes back and it's nice and clean and dry. A bit like opening a door, closing it, then opening it again and walking in."

-Stephen Street

"Other times, I'd drop off a cassette of some music at Morrissey's house. He lived about two miles away, and I'd ride round there on my Yamaha DT 175 and post them through his letterbox. 'Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others' was done that way. All the music for that came in one wave while I was watching telly with the sound down."

"Some things just drop out of the heavens, and 'Some Girls...' was one of them. It's a beautiful piece of music."

"I think I used a Rickenbacker 330 with delay on and a Strat for the outro. A lot of chorus and delay, I think."

- Johnny Marr

This one has a lot of renditions on youtube, which is great. It's a challenging part, but it's something that once you hear, you want to learn... at least I feel that way. A lot of people have taken it on, so I have posted as many good versions as I could find

Also, there are 2 Guitar Pro tab files I uploaded here(right click to save). One is for the live version, but it's not complete.

Daniel Cárdenas informed me that the Guitar Pro version posted here was in a weird tuning(second string was tuned up 1/2 step) and was in the wrong key. He transcribed the song into the correct key, and I transposed the fretboard positions into something that I think is more accurate. I moved the figures down one fret, which eliminates 1st fret barre chords and utilizes more open strings and open chord positions. I have left the older version in the rar file for comparison purposes. If you can help improve it further, let me know.

Here is a scan from Guitare Xtreme, a French magazine:

Thanks to reader Dupont Dupond for the scan.

Here are the scans from the Complete Chord Dictionary:

Here are the scans from the Queen Is Dead piano songbook with guitar chord boxes:

Daniel Earwicker's first attempt:

His second attempt, this time a fairly definitive cover of the 'live' version:

tomscotland on a strat:

goleirinho, whose version is the first left-handed video I have posted!

elvismarinho's cover:

and here's Stevebanany:

smitestyle is next:

sonofdrcross again does both guitar and bass really well:

Here's buckleyboyben:

Here's another version by barjabulon:

Here's Salvia02390 with his take on the live version:

Here's two spot on guitar and bass covers by johnnymare:

Here's a great bass cover by my friend John Biscuiti:

And lastly, here's The Smiths at their final show. Johnny plays it, um, like a ringin' a bell. Just totally effortless and smooth, it's

amazing.

Wonderful Woman

"I loved that song. I really, really loved it. Thats a good example of John Porter bringing out the essence of the band and a certain kind of sadness and putting it on the record. I always saw 'Wonderful Woman' as this thick, melancholic, dense atmosphere. It needed to drip with atmosphere and John had the patience to pour over it and do that. It all started to come together at about half four in the morning. I was thrashed through sheer tiredness because we'd been working three days non-stop. Those schedules that Rough Trade put John Porter under were unbelieveable by anyone's standards. But I was dying on me knees and John was going, 'Let's put a vibrato on that bit, let's do a high string thing here.' We were restringing guitars at five in the morning, just for one little bit, but he helped me through it."

"I always liked that song. I did it with John Porter during the night and I was pretty spaced out, it was magic though. I think I was 'muffled and strange' so that's why it sounds the way it does. "

- Johnny Marr

I have a Guitar Pro tab file and have uploaded it here(right click to save as). It seems fairly accurate to my ears, which is fantastic, because this is an amazing song that is often overlooked. The bass part is included in the tab.

Here are the scans from the Complete Chord Dictionary:

Daniel Earwicker does a haunting instrumental version on his Rickenbacker:

Here is captaincarwash, with a great sounding multi-track version:

dhowellbassist does a great version on his Ric 360:

And here are The Smiths, playing the song live, on July 6th, 1983:

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

"I remember being in a Pizzaland in Altrincham, giving the waitress my order - yeah, yeah, cheese and tomato, all that - and she said, You know the strings on 'There Is A Light' - is that an emulator or is it played? (Laughs) I was like, Whaaat? Are you fuckin' joking or what? What a fucking question!"

-Mike Joyce

"I think if we'd had a string quartet at the time we would have used it. But the fact that there was a keyboard there at the time... We just made it sound as real as possible."

"I was a bit fucked up, but I also had the worst roadie in the world. Throughout the set, me and Johnny used two tunings: one in F sharp and one in E, 'cos of Morrissey's range. Out of four or five gigs, this guy got it right once. I'd say, Right — There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. Pass me the one in F sharp. He'd pass me the E bass, and I'd be a tone out."

-Andy Rourke

"If we needed some songs fast, then Morrissey would come round to my place and I'd sit there with an acoustic guitar and a cassette recorder. 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' was done that way."

"Morrissey was sat on a coffee table, perched on the edge. I was sat with my guitar on a chair directly in front of him. He had A Sony Walkman recording, waiting to hear what I was gonna pull out. So I said, 'Well, I've got this one' and I started playing these chords. He just looked at me as I was playing. It was as if he daren't speak, in case the spell was broke."

"We recorded 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' in 10 minutes. I went on to add some flute overdub and strings and a couple of extra guitars, but really, the essence and the spirit of it was captured straight away, and that normally means that something's gone really, really right. I have a version of that take with just the three instruments and the voice on it – it absolutely holds up as a beautiful moment in time. The Smiths were all in love with the sound that we were making. We loved it as much as everyone else, but we were lucky enough to be the ones playing it."

"I didn't realise that 'There Is A Light' was going to be an anthem but when we first played it I thought it was the best song I'd ever heard. There's a little in-joke in there just to illustrate how intellectual I was getting. At the time everyone was into the Velvet Underground and they stole the intro to 'There She Goes' - da da da-da, da da-da-da, Dah Dah! - from the Rolling Stones version of 'Hitchhike,' the Marvin Gaye song. I just wanted to put that in to see whether the press would say, Oh it's the Velvet Underground! Cos I knew that I was smarter than that. I was listening to what The Velvet Underground was listening to."

-Johnny Marr

I have found an extended version of the Johnny Marr BBC video that I posted earlier. Here, he plays more of "There is a light" all the way up to the end of a verse, and the sound isn't faded out like it was in the first video. I have to say, this clip gives me chills. It's just so cool to see him up close playing a Smiths song.

This video has a different camera angle, which might be helpful.

Here is Johnny playing it at 7 Worlds Collide, you can also get some good angles of his playing. Thanks go to lordez185 for shooting this video:

Guitar Pro tabs for this song are here(right-click to save). There are 2 different versions of the tab that I've included... one has 7 tracks, one has 3. There is also a tab of Johnny's arpeggio from the BBC segment above, submitted by Mathieu.

Here are the tabs from the Singles book:

Here are the scans from the Smiths Best Complete Score:

Here are the scans from the Complete Chord Dictionary:

Here are the scans from the Queen Is Dead piano book, with guitar chord boxes:

Here is a breadown lesson of the BBC chords and riff by 74949 on youtube:

Here's the evergreen Daniel Earwicker with another spot on cover:

djs1986 gives another multi-instrumental take, inspired by Daniel's version above:

Jahnli does a really nice version here, with a gentle vocal arrangement:

TboneWilson1978 uploaded a cool lesson here:

IrishBog does his take on Johnny's playing from the BBC video:

Here's davidguitarist91 on his Les Paul:

chiasson65 contributes another spot-on bass cover:

Suffer Little Children

"I think we probably did it on our first two gigs. I think we were writing better stuff - that's the answer. It was always considered an album track. Maybe we had a doubt about it at the time."

"Looking back on the first album now I can say that I'm not as madly keen on it as I was. I think that a lot of the fire was missing on it and most of our supporters realise that as well. Although having said that, 'Still Ill' and 'Suffer Little Children' and 'Hand That Rocks' are all still great songs."

-Johnny Marr

Suffer Little Children was played live only once that we know of, on October 4th, 1982. It has a haunting quality to the guitar line, which is fairly simple and repetitive compared to some other Marr compositions. I think that it's a good song for beginners to tackle because it sounds just as good slow as it does fast, and you can ramp up the speed when you get the hang of it.

First off, here are the scans from the debut album piano song book:

marrzipan is one of the many cool, generous guitarists who make this site possible, and he has a great version of this on youtube. He was kind enough to share the tabs he made from his cover. I have posted them here, with his notes(click to enlarge):

He also passed along a Guitar Pro tab that I have uploaded here. It has a tab of the second and third guitar parts as well!

Here's his version to follow along with:

For comparison, here is Daniel Earwicker's take on the song. He uses a pull-off where Marzipan fretted notes on the second chord of the verse. It's different in other ways as well, but both are really great versions.

adameater also does a nice acoustic version. It sounds a little different from both of these; I think he might be incorporating some of the second guitar, which is cool.

Here's uncleskinny on acoustic:

Here's davidguitarist91 on his Les Paul:

Here's a great multi-track version by captaincarwash:

How Soon Is Now?

"I had an impression of what Creedence were supposed to be about, partly because I had already gotten into The Gun Club and heard 'Run Through The Jungle' from their second album. It triggered off some echoes of what I'd heard of Creedence. So I made this demo, 'Swamp', trying to capture the same vibe. It didn't have the tremelo figure on it, but it had the slide part in regular concert tuning. It was quite a pretty figure, but only hinting at what it became. It was still quite passive, nowhere near as intense as it got. I remember us playing it for a while and me really hoping that we could make it sound like a Smiths track, because the chances were it might not have. We kicked it around until it did feel like us, but I could tell that it had something lacking. So I saw my opportunity to throw the tremelo part down that I'd been looking to use for quite a while."

"It was my boyhood love of 'Disco Stomp', Can's 'I Want More' and then tying the whole thing together with the Bo Diddley bow, as it were. That was the whole thing."

"I wanted an intro that was almost as potent as 'Layla.' When it plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is."

"I've actually started using a digital delay line, just because for one song in particular I needed to use it. I just sent the effect straight through the Fender twin. The song is the 'B' side of the twelve-inch 'William, It Was Really Nothing' and it's called 'How Soon Is Now?' which is a 'Bo Diddley' thing, so I had to have the vibrato. I sent all the signal through the Fender twin and just put straight guitar through the Roland. I just stuck a slide on and it worked. I was a little bit worried because it was difficult to play. For the first time I'd done something really tricky in the studio which I had to reproduce live. We've done lots of things which I'd never be able to reproduce live just because there are more important things going on. The songs have never suffered because I normally tend to play them the way they're written live and if an overdub turns out to be an essential part of the song maybe I'll switch to that. 'How Soon Is Now?' is quite a difficult one as there are two completely separate guitar parts that can't be played at the same time. What I do is change to a guitar which has the bottom four strings tuned conventionally, but the E string is tuned a third above the B. I play into the digital delay and put it on hold to play over it. I just take the hold off when we get to the other chorus bits and I can play that with the bottom four strings and then the hold goes back on. I had to send the signal through the Fender twin because of the vibrato. The only difficulty with using vibrato all the way through a song is that you've got to really get it in time and Mike the drummer has got to ride the beat. I was really panicking before the gigs but it turned out OK. It doesn't sound exactly the same live as on the record but it is still as powerful and still as atmospheric so I'm happy with it."

"'How Soon Is Now' was in F# tuning. I wanted a very swampy sound, a modern bayou song. It's a straight E riff, followed by open G and F#m7. The chorus uses open B, A, and D shapes with the top two strings ringing out. The vibrato sound is fucking incredible, and it took a long time. I put down the rhythm track on an Epiphone Casino through a Fender Twin Reverb without vibrato. Then we played the track back through four old Twins, one on each side. We had to keep all the amps vibratoing in time to the track and each other, so we had to keep stopping and starting the track, recording it in 10-second bursts. I wish I could remember exactly how we did the slide part -- not writing it down is one of the banes of my life! We did it in three passes through a harmonizer, set to some weird interval, like a sixth. There was a different harmonization for each pass. For the line in harmonics, I retuned the guitar so that I could play it all at the 12th fret with natural harmonics. It's doubled several times."

"In ‘How Soon Is Now’ the harmonic lick is from Lovebug Starski: that was me getting one up on the journalists, putting a lick from a hip-hop record into a Smiths song. "

"'How Soon Is Now?' was the one, though. I wanted to write a track with an intro that you couldn't forget, something that you knew straight away was The Smiths. In that regard it was very "worked on". I arrived at the studio with a demo of the whole thing, apart from the tremolo effect - though that was bound to surface on a Smiths track sooner or later, 'cos at that time I was playing Bo Diddley stuff everywhere I went. I wanted it to be really, really tense and swampy, all at the same time. 'Layering the slide part was what gave it the real tension. As soon as I played that bit on the second and third strings, John Porter put an AMS harmoniser on it. Then we recorded each individual string with the harmoniser, then we tuned the B string down a half step and harmonised the whole thing. The tremolo effect came from laying down a regular rhythm part (with a capo at the 2nd fret) on a Les Paul, then sending that out in to the live room to four Fender Twins. John was controlling the tremolo on two of them and I was controlling the other two, and whenever they went out of sync we just had to stop the track and start all over again. It took an eternity. God bless the sampler, 'cos it would have been so much easier! But it was just one of those great moments. When Morrissey sang the vocal it was the first time we'd all heard it. John Porter said, 'Oh, great - he's singing about the elements! I am the sun and the air...' But of course it was really, I am the son and the heir/of a shyness that is criminally vulgar... A great track."

"If you were to play 'How Soon Is Now?' on piano or acoustic guitar, it wouldn't have the same impact as the finished article – the power of the record has a lot to do with the sound and the instrumentation and not necessarily the words and the chords. That's very satisfying for me because 'How Soon Is Now?' is built on the guitar – unlike poetry, sound is something that's beyond intellectual ideas, it's primal and otherworldly. But I was ecstatic when the words came on top of the music. They are actually quite brilliant. The contrast between the two worlds that Morrissey and I lived in worked especially well on 'How Soon Is Now?'. That's what made our songwriting partnership so interesting; the intellectual, self-conscious analysis, and the streetwise druggy exuberance."

"As a kid I was fascinated by Hamilton Bohannon's 'Disco Stomp' and 'New York Groove' by Hello, and I wanted to make something with that stomp. The first decent amp I got was the Fender Twin because the Patti Smith Group used it, and it had this amazing tremolo. Later when we'd had a few hits, a review of What Difference Does It Make said I'd written a riff that was instantly recognizable, which fascinated me. One night I was playing for my own pleasure and I suddenly got the riff. It all came together - the tremolo and the stomping groove - for what became How Soon Is Now, although my demo was titled Swamp. Because it was a groove track it originally appeared as an extra track on a 12-inch, but popular clamor forced its single release. I remember when Morrissey first sang: 'I am the son and the heir...' John Porter went, 'Ah great, the elements!' Morrissey continued, '...of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.' I knew he'd hit the bullseye there and then."

"'How Soon Is Now' is a great phrase. Because it's obviously 'I Want It Now'! How fast can you do it?... That was a very important song for us. It was an important song for me because I have two very strong influences pulling at me, both ways. One is as a guitar player and the other is as a writer. And 'How Soon Is Now' satisfied both elements. Perfectly for me, while still giving something to Morrissey which he could really work on and add his fifty percent to."

- Johnny Marr

Here is a great video of Johnny playing the song: