Sunday, June 1, 2008

Give a Little Bit and Feel Like Makin' Love

For this post, I am going to give my interpretation of some of the often-confused chords and chord progressions for two songs-Give a Little Bit-by Supertramp/Roger Hodgson, and Feel Like Makin' Love, by Bad Company.

I have played these songs by ear for years now, and recently, when I wanted to check on some of the chord voicings and tablature on the Internet, I found tabs and chord charts that had chords and parts that I feel aren't accurate or even missing parts-(Give a Little Bit).

For Give a Little Bit, the basic chords are: A7, D, G, Bmin, F#min, Esus4, E, with some other variations of the main chords thrown in. I have seen information given for this song where the A7 is a "regular A," or where the Esus4 is Emin7 or where the A7 , G and D in the main verse is a harder to play "unopen" A, G and D at the 3rd and 5th fret with the respective 4th string root notes. My point? I just feel that for a beginning guitarist who sees these transcriptions, it would be frustrating to play them when the song doesn't sound like that. Also, this song is fairly easy for a beginning guitarist to play. Many of the chords are two or three-finger chords and many of them are open chords. Why make this song so hard? Play it with those open notes that just ring out! If ever there was a song that was meant to be played with open chords, this is that song! (*I noticed that this mp3 copy is a little sharp. You may have to tune slightly sharp to match the tuning on this version.)



I started off this Give a Little Bit thing with planning a simple explanation of the chords and then I realized that there were some changes I needed to note so I kept going until I had several pages of chord changes completed. Considering the song's title, I guess that's ironic! I made some mistakes and corrected until I got the charts to where I think its understandable.

Below is the main verse part with the chorus and bridge. (click to enlarge)













Next, are some parts of Feel Like Makin' Love by Bad Company. For this song, I saw the opening descending acoustic riff done mostly correctly on one transcription, but I noted it here just in case you're interested in learning it. For this opening progression, you play that descending riff and then the second time it finishes with the open D at the second fret. I do the distorted heavy guitar part on the chorus by muting and quickly playing the C on the 5th string/3rd fret and the open D 4th string and "ending on a "regular" D chord. I do this by holding a D chord and using my middle finger to play the C on the 5th string and then moving to the F# on the 1st string/2nd fret for the D chord. Palm muting is important here as the riff wouldn't sound right if the C and D of the riff are not played in this way-at least for my ears. The C and G chords in this heavy part sound to me like (and are more easily played using these) "regular" C and G chords, and I did note chord names in the tab.

For the first clean solo, I just transcribed how I learned to play it by ear. Where it says barre I am barring the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strings on that whole little passage with my first finger (and hammering on with my 2nd and 3rd fingers) until it gets to the Bmin/D, and D13 where I barre the 1st, 2nd and 3rd strings, etc. It may be wrong, but I think this way sure sounds similar to the way Mick Ralphs played it. If you have any questions about the lick or anything about these chord for both songs, don't hesitate to leave a line or two about it! Thanks for coming by! (click to enlarge) PM=Palm Mute H=Hammer on











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