Earth Wind & Fire - September (Quick Guitar Tutorial + Tabs)

- Content:
Lead Guitar (00:00), Verse/Bridge (00:45), Chorus (01:05)

- PDF Tabs:

- Guitar Pro tabs:

- Facebook:

[PhilMoskowitz]

Much like "Shining Star", there are two guitar parts in the intro.

[thisguyhd]

is it weird that I learned all of this jsut by hearing and looking at what you did for 10 seconds o_O ?

[pomz]

Short - Simple - Straight to the Point and easy! Great job dude!

[fklujpp]

Sadly, I do not believe that learning the song as shown here will do anyone any good. I pray I won't offend the owner of the channel in any way - I'll just write down what I noticed about the guitar playing in the video and wish that it is impersonal enough and backed by enough evidence that you guys can see my point of view.

Firstly, the tone. You play what looks like an almost unused Fender Strat into a small practice amp and it just does not sound funky to my ear at all. Part of it is the missing percussive playing that's so essential to funk guitar - more on that below -, part of it may be the middle pickup mixed in with the bridge; but another, smaller, part is that the tone ( again, to my ear - sorry to sound like a douche ) is just all around 'meh'. The strumming parts sound the closest to the original, albeit too treble-y; but the intro has no life in that tone. It also almost sounds like a faint chorus effect or detune is used which does not serve this kind of music very well - long story short, I don't like the overall sound you got very much; but that's all to taste and I'm prepared to accept my wrongness on the subject. Also, it's a tutorial on playing, not on tone, so we're absolutely cool here. Just keep in mind that getting closer to the original tone is the easiest way to make the song sound more like the original song - no practicing involved.

Next up, the technique of sliding your first finger up and down the fretboard, the technique you employ to play the intro, shouldn't be copied here. It has some uses in expressive, violin-like soli, but it sounds subpar in funk. In the video you can hear offbeat playing, notes that are too long or short for the rhythm, you can hear the slide noises that shouldn't be there and you are able to notice little 'hiccups' between notes that are two frets or farther apart - and I believe all of that is due to the employment of this technique. You should use at least three fingers for that intro, especially when playing 11-9-7 on the d-string - but you won't be able to stretch like that with three fingers for a long time. So, the best-sounding way of playing these three notes in particular and the whole intro in general is by using four fingers, with fingers 4/2/1 playing 11/9/7 respectively. It may feel weird at first and that pinky may need daily supervision to become manageable after a while, but having your fingers already press the next note down when you release the previous note smoothens out any kinks or 'micro-silences' between notes that occur every time you try to slide your finger across two frets or more. And not wasting all that time sliding around to change notes will also allow you to nail the correct note lengths for those notes - you're making it harder on yourself to sound in rhythm than it has to be, as using your technique effectively cuts off the ends of notes when you have to move your finger to be on the next note in time. That's why the rhythm and 'feel' of the intro is slightly off.

One last thing on the intro: It doesn't seem to me like you're palm-muting that little intro lick anywhere close to enough. This makes it so the intro notes ring out when they should have a 'staccato' feel to them ( you can also use the techique described further down to get the staccato effect, or combine both to really nail the tone and feel ). The staccato contrasts beautifully with the chord inversions played by the second guitar during the intro. Now it could be that you did not palm mute this line because you wanted your viewers to hear it clearer, in which case I may be able to follow you. If so, it still wouldn't have hurt to play it once like you did, ringing out, and then play it the way it's supposed to be played, which is palm muted and staccato. The way you presented the intro in the video, and I'm not saying that you haven't mastered the palm muting or string deadening techniques at home - maybe you just didn't want to or forgot to play it -, I'm sorry to say is not sounding like the original. Yes, the correct notes are there, but everything else will need a bit more practice.

The most important thing I noticed concerns the basic technique of playing 'funky'. While the chords sound nice and 'bell-like' on that main song playthrough, the rhythm is off and the ghostnotes feel thrown in there to see where they might stick. I feel you tried to emulate the 'chakka chakka chakka' sound that is the absolute bedrock of funk playing by scraping your pick over the strings in a rhythm that fits the song. Your hands are making music, but they are not playing funk yet. Most of the time when this happens, the confusion stems from thinking that the right hand has to accent any kind of rhythm like you do when playing open chords. This is not what you do in the genre of funk. In funk, the guitar takes on rhythm duties from the bass and the drums, leaving them open to play those flowing, groovy bass lines or weird rhythms. You, the guitar player, serve as the metronome for your colleagues and help keep everything grounded this way. When playing funk, just think 'I am the beat of the song, not the drummer. I am the groove of the song, not the bass player.'

So the funk guitar has to be one thing above all else if she wants to do all those things, and that is being steady. This steadiness is achieved by strumming the right hand up and down in timing ( sometimes in a 1/8 groove, but most of the time in 1/16 ), letting your pick hit the notes on the higher strings with every down- and every upstrum with the same intensity. The key is to then mute any chords in the rhythm you want to by lifting your LEFT hand slightly of the fretboard to deaden the strings, and play any chords you want to be heard by pressing down on the fretboard with your left hand, fingering the chord again. So the rhythm is not at all made by the right hand, only the tempo is. The rhythm comes from relaxing to mute chords and pressing to play chords with your left hand. As mentioned, when practicing this, try to only hit the highest four strings and play inverted chords up the neck to get that 'funky' sound. Not hitting the lowest strings ensures we won't clash with our bass player ( who does quite a lot of work in funk music, so you do not want to intrude into his lower frequency domain ) and cut through the mix nicely.

Some last observations: the 'GMaj7/A' at the end of the verses is not a 'GM7/A' like you display in your video - which would translate to a 'G minor 7 with an A in the bass', even if you capitalize that 'M'. It's a very minor thing, but people learning this song from you will get confused.

And finally, you built the last chord of the verse 'GMaj7/A' very slowly ( no doubt due to it being used very little and it being a 4-fret-stretch chord ) to the point where you don't play the G on the 5th fret of the d-string when the chord is supposed to hit on the 1 of that measure - you're basically not done with the chord when the 1 hits. This in turn also leads to you missing out on the open A string when hitting the 'GMaj7/A' on the 1, which is not what we want when we call our chord 'xxx with A in the bass'. In fact, it seems you do not play the A note at all in your chord, on the 1 or anywhere else. If you do not play the A in the bass or the G on the d-string, you basically get a standard, simple 'B minor' inversion consisting of the usual B minor chord notes - B/D/Fsharp. If the chord continues to prove tricky, you can somewhat cheat by getting the A from the high e-string's 5th fret - it's no bass note then, but the chord would at least consist of four notes, building the tension it is put there to build. The then-missing 'Fsharp' is of course played on the d-string, 4th fret, while the G is omitted.


Ok, so I just typed in everything I noticed, and I would be lying if I said that I do this for every guitar video on Youtube. My reasons to do so here were simple: First of all, I was where the poster of our video is and would have definitely hated it when someone came along and told me about all the things I can improve upon - yet after my anger would vanish a few hours later, I would see the merit in someone pointing out some things to me. Maybe they are totally dumb things, or maybe some of them lead me to tackle problems in a different way or adopt a new point of view. An the end, you guys decide what you want to do with the information given here.

The smaller one of my motivators was simple, but also somewhat mean: I really do not think you should upload stuff as a tutorial when, quite frankly, you have no business teaching other people yet and could do with some practice yourself. Yes, I hear how mean that sounds, and I'm really sorry for it. It's not my intention at all to belittle the original poster in any way, and I hope you guys see what I'm trying to do here. I do not wish to say he is a bad musician or a bad person at all. This is the very first video of him I came across, I do not know him in any way, shape or form. I just wanted to express my opinion on what is called a 'tutorial' today - it's super hard to do that without anyone feeling unjustly accused. I would've had no quarrel whatsoever with a video titled 'showing the notes and chords of SEPTEMBER', or 'my performance of SEPTEMBER with chords'. But if you call it 'tutorial', as in 'wanting to show other people how it is done correctly', I think that fair, explained criticism may or even should be given out.

Just ignore all of my improvement advice if you think I'm full of ****, or find some value and truth to it, then do with it what you will. Make up your own minds about the topics and techniques I touched upon and please, feel free to tell me what a jerk I am if you do think so. I upvoted this video as it got me thinking for the better part of an hour now, and I wish the owner of the channel nothing but the best on his quest to conquer the guitar. Just keep at it.