Performance Notes

HOW TO PLAY THIS MONTH'S SONGS

- Jimmy Brown

"WILL OF THE PEOPLE" 

Muse

MUSE MASTERMIND Matt Bellamy used both his go-to Manson guitar and early Eighties Fender Telecaster to track this popular new song's simple but highly effective and super catchy six-string parts. Also employing fuzz distortion and octave doubling effects (both an octave above and below), the crafty guitarist achieves a huge, Godzilla-like tone that fills out the sonic spectrum in an exciting way and carries the song, which is essentially built around two very basic and repetitive bass-line-type single-note riffs.

Before playing any notes, Bellamy establishes the song's infectious triplet-based shuffle groove in the intro by strumming his bottom three strings in a lopsided swing eighths rhythm - "long-short-long-short" - while using fret-hand muting to prevent any notes from sounding, resulting in a pitchless, percussive attack. Indicated by stacks of X's in the tablature, these scratchy "chik-a chik-a" rhythms are performed by lightly laying all four fret-hand fingers across the strings at an arbitrary point - it doesn't matter where specifically the hand is positioned, as no notes are sounded while strumming down-up-down-up, with the previously described rhythmic feel.

Bellamy introduces the song's main riff two bars into the first verse, with bassist Chris Wolstenholme doubling the notes an octave lower (see section B, bars 10-12). The riff is based on the A minor pentatonic scale (A, C, D, E, G), with two well-placed chromatic passing tones inserted - C#, between C and D, and G, between G and A - which help give the riff a "futuristic bluesy" quality. Notice also the call-and-response phrasing structure within the two-bar riff, as well as to the way it relates to the vocals in the larger repeating four-bar phrase.