Go get all the James Brown guitar tabs and there you have it.

WonHungLo said:

Was it Jimmy Jam who reckoned Prince is the greatest ever rythm guitarist? (on the UK BBC Radio docu). I'd agree - his funky rythms surpassed those before him. Totally undervalued.

Yeah. JJ said that.

The tabs do the rhythms injustice tho.

When you read the rhythms, you have to remember that MOST of his rhythm playing has a swing to it - it's NEVER straight-up 8th or 16th or dotted 13th notes. The trick is to learn that swing part, and how to staccato the notes, control hits differently, some hits are softer than others.

It's mostly just a single chord, and the trick is the delivery.

Take controversy for instance. Some hits are softer, to give it that rhythmic feel instead of just "blaah,dada,bladadada", it's more BLAH-dat-da, blah-da-datDAH"

Sure. if you know the song, that up there makes sense.

So really, all you need are some Prince chords, and then go practice your right hand technique, and your left-hand muting technique - learn how to control the volume with the left hand - looser = quieter, choked up tone. Like my song (yeah, ya'll knew THIS was coming) Star69 on the NFO release ... a VERY similar pattern plays through the entire song. Go hear it at http://www.newfunkorder.com.

And yeah, there's a bajillion posts in here on the topic.
[This message was edited Thu Aug 7 14:38:28 PDT 2003 by otan]

Something like C#dim to C#mdim:

4 - 4
5 - 6
4 - 4
6 - 6
4 - 4
X - X

That's all I'm doing through most of the song, except the chorus, where I change the top string to 7 so there's a dominant octave of some sort in there. Really, it was all just moving my fingers around til I heard something good, and then chucka-chucka for awhile.

There was no music theory or knowledge of chord changes applied - i just like the way the chord changed from minor to major - and even THAT I didn't know until after I'd played it for awhile.

The original riff I came up with is on the opening flash thing on my website: www.blindslim.com - same riff, but with distortion and a wah, and played on the zero fret instead of all barred up like that there.

wrong