Flesh and Blood

Description

What's up people! This is Henrik for Guitar Tricks and today we're going to take a look at how to play "Flesh and Blood", as made famous by Johnny Cash. We'll be taking a look at three different guitars here; one acoustic rhythm guitar, one electric rhythm guitar, and we're also going to check out a little acoustic solo. For the acoustic guitars we're going to put a capo on the 2nd fret.

The song will start out with a very country influenced intro on the acoustic guitar. We'll follow with the electric guitar and set us up for the first verse. Once the song gets going we'll be doing some single note riffs on the electric guitar outlining the chords, and the acoustic guitar will be playing a strumming pattern that sticks very much to the Johnny Cash sound but also has some embellishments.

The choruses will employ the same technique for both guitars. An interesting thing about the choruses is that they're almost just an extension of the verses; sort of like a hook at the end of the verses. A very common format of writing for this genre. After the 2nd chorus we have a little interlude where an acoustic guitar will play a subtle but very nice solo, also outlining the chord progression.

The song is pretty straight forward as far as the arrangement goes but as usual with Johnny Cash, there is a bit of a twist. In the last verse we'll be doing something called rubato, which basically means that time stops and you have to follow the singers cue for when the chords should be played. We're going to end the song where we started, because the intro of the song, is also the outro of the song.

The song is in 4/4 time signature and at a tempo of 162 BPM.