Bo Diddley Beat
Lesson time: (3min 28sec)
Free lesson
This lesson is part of the course Learn guitar and songwriting with KT Tunstall
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Lesson transcript:
Influences of Blues in My Music
The other thing I was listening to a lot when I was making that first record was blues.
As you can hear, "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" is 100% completely influenced by the blues. I was listening to a lot of lesser-known, kind of anonymous blues music that was all recorded on one mic in the middle of the room. Whoever had the solo would walk up to the mic and step back again.
And I was just really kind of locking in that connection with my writing to rhythm and how important rhythm is to my writing and being a rhythm player.
The Tradition of Music
It's interesting with music, there's this line where plagiarism comes into play. But all the way up to that line is the tradition of the digestion of music that you love surfacing in what you're making yourself.
It's a beautiful tradition. I mean, you know, you've seen it more recently with hip hop and sampling. There's kind of an unspoken rule that:
- As long as you take what you're taking and use it really well
- And make it your own, then it's okay.
I do agree with that. I think it's storytelling, it's a very old, ancient folk tale, folk singing tradition of taking songs and changing them. And it mutates over time. You can trace this kind of ancestry of sound through many, many songs.
The Hambone Beat
In this one, I straight up took from Bo Diddley's beat, which is called the hambone beat. Blues musicians used to hit their bodies and hit their thighs.
I can't do it, but if you look up "Ham Bone Beat" on YouTube, you'll see some amazing videos of musicians using their bodies as drum kits, basically. This is the hambone beat that Bo Diddley used in a lot of his music. He apparently heard it when he was 11 years old and that hooked him on the hambone beat. He brought it to the world, and of course, it's been used everywhere.
So, Faith, desire, you too, I mean, it just goes on and on. There are so many songs that use that beat, but that's the beat I wanted to use on the track on the album.
Achieving the Rhythm
There are kind of layers of percussion that help that, but you can easily achieve that rhythm just on your own. It's much easier with a pick. I would say that if you're playing with your fingers, you're probably going to end up with no nails at the end of it.
From a percussion point of view, the pick is a really great tool when you're playing the guitar.
When I play the song live, instead of just going straight in, I really like to pay homage to that Bo Diddley beat using the rhythm of the guitar and bending. I love bending the strings on my guitar.
It sounds so cool, and you've just got to get strong in the hand for that stuff. But the other thing that's nice with this song, because it's so well known, is that it's always nice to tease the song everyone knows. It sort of gives a little teaser that you're going to play it.
About the instructor
Photo credit: Tom Oxley Since scoring a worldwide smash with her debut album 'Eye To The Telescope' in 2004, which went on to sell over 5 million copies, KT Tunstall has remained at the forefront of UK singer-songwriter talent. KT followed up that early success with the albums 'Drastic Fantastic', 'Tiger Suit' and 'Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon' in 2007, 2010 and 2013 respectively, keeping the platinum sales rolling and cementing the Scottish singer-songwriter's reputation as a major recording talent, as well as a mesmerising live artist. 2012 and the years that followed saw a seismic shift in outlook - the loss of her father, a divorce, and a relocation to Venice Beach, California. After a period of healing, soul-searching, and a change of scenery, 2016 hailed the arrival of the first of a trilogy of KT Tunstall's albums, the critically acclaimed UK top 10 album 'KIN'. The trilogy evokes, separately and in sequence, spirit, body and mind. With 'KIN' being her phoenix-from-the-ashes 'spirit' album, 2018 marked the second offering of that trilogy, the 'body' album 'WAX'. KT Tunstall has toured the world many times over. She outsold every other female artist in the UK in 2005, won the 2006 Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist, won the Ivor Novello Best Song award for her huge, self-penned hit 'Suddenly I See', and a Q award for Track of the Year. She also landed a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance with 'Black Horse and the Cherry Tree' and lent her tunes to a host of movies and TV shows ('Suddenly I See' being used in the iconic opening scene of the modern classic Meryl Streep film 'The Devil Wears Prada'). The first single from her latest release, 'The River', was named one of Rolling Stone's 'Songs You Need To Know'. The last few years have seen something of a creative rebirth for KT Tunstall. Upon relocating to the west coast of the USA, she was accepted as one of six annual fellows for the Sundance Film Institute's Composers Lab (hosted by George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in Northern California) and has since scored music for short and feature films. She has also been awarded the Inspirational Artist gong at the Women In Music Awards and was chosen as the first ever female Grand Marshal (following the likes of Sir Sean Connery) to lead April 2018's annual New York Tartan Week parade. In May 2018 she and Mike McCready, of legendary multi-million selling Pearl Jam, released a cover of Tom Petty's huge hit single 'I Won't Back Down' with proceeds going to Pearl Jam's Vitalogy Foundation. In 2018, KT performed sold-out intimate headline shows across the UK and US and toured worldwide supporting acclaimed artists including Simple Minds, The Pretenders, and Barenaked Ladies. 2019 saw KT perform a large headline tour across the UK and Europe with her all-female band, playing festivals all over the UK (including a headline set at Glastonbury Festival). She toured the US & Canada, Japan, China, the Netherlands, Mexico and Brazil, as well as supporting Hall & Oates on their UK arena tour. Touring continued for KT in early 2020 with headline shows in the US, performing with Jools Holland across Europe, and playing New York's legendary Madison Square Garden, supporting Hall & Oates. In her Song Studies course, KT pulls back the curtain on the guitar parts and songwriting craft behind her biggest hits - a rare chance to learn how a Brit Award-winning, Grammy-nominated songwriter actually builds a song. read more