Jumpin’ Jack Flash - Strange Observation

Hi Mike

This is an observation that leads to a question. I'd like to hear your take on this.

I did your Jumpin' Jack Flash lesson a couple of months ago (great lesson by the way). I've been practicing it to the point that I can now play along with your single guitar performance track pretty well. And it sounds good (if I may say so myself). So today I tried playing it along with the actual Stones recording. It sounded terrible!!! (Not just me but the recording including Mick Jaggers voice.) It sounded like back in the old days when a cassette tape would get stretched out and effect the pitch. As soon as I stopped playing my guitar the recording sounded fine again. Then I remembered that you said in the lesson that Keith Richards used open E tuning on the recording. But it's still the same key right? Just a different way of hitting the same chords. So why does it sound so terrible playing with the recording, when I sound pretty good playing with your single guitar performance track?

Prior to this song I had learned Day Tripper, Satisfaction, Norwegian Wood, Proud Mary (CCR), Imagine and Lover me Tender from the GT lessons. For each of them I can play along with the original artist recording and I/they sound pretty good. Very enjoyable and satisfying to play along with the idols of my youth. Thank you so much to you and the other teachers for getting me there.

So ... still wondering ... why is Jumpin' Jack Flash different?

Hey there - great question!!

[br]It seems the original recording of this song is a little flat, so yes, if your guitar is tuned up to standard, it will sound bad.

We taught it in B because it's not quite flat enough to be in Bb (it's tuned somewhere between Bb and B) Also, when you reference live versions of the song, they are definitely in B.

One solution is to detune the B string of your guitar a little while playing the track, and see if you can get it to match the overall pitch of the song. Then you can retune all the strings to match the flatted B string - then you could play along with the song.

Another thing you could try if you have a computer, is to get some music playback software that lets you load in an mp3 of the song and vary the pitch. Then you could increase the pitch a bit to match B.

Hope this makes sense!

Mike

Originally Posted by: ScubaCPA

Hi Mike

This is an observation that leads to a question. I'd like to hear your take on this.

I did your Jumpin' Jack Flash lesson a couple of months ago (great lesson by the way). I've been practicing it to the point that I can now play along with your single guitar performance track pretty well. And it sounds good (if I may say so myself). So today I tried playing it along with the actual Stones recording. It sounded terrible!!! (Not just me but the recording including Mick Jaggers voice.) It sounded like back in the old days when a cassette tape would get stretched out and effect the pitch. As soon as I stopped playing my guitar the recording sounded fine again. Then I remembered that you said in the lesson that Keith Richards used open E tuning on the recording. But it's still the same key right? Just a different way of hitting the same chords. So why does it sound so terrible playing with the recording, when I sound pretty good playing with your single guitar performance track?

Prior to this song I had learned Day Tripper, Satisfaction, Norwegian Wood, Proud Mary (CCR), Imagine and Lover me Tender from the GT lessons. For each of them I can play along with the original artist recording and I/they sound pretty good. Very enjoyable and satisfying to play along with the idols of my youth. Thank you so much to you and the other teachers for getting me there.

So ... still wondering ... why is Jumpin' Jack Flash different?

Mike. Thanks for the reply. Makes perfect sense. So happy to know it wasn't me!

Thanks

Gary