STING'S MOST COPIED RIFF - Why it's so HARD to get it right

Well there's his

riff

and I'm sure everyone here is, but of course all of these songs were sampled from Sting's original Shape of My Heart, but did you know there's a lot more to this Rift than you might expect? and, furthermore, touch it absolutely? true, it's difficult and that's also because there are some down

right

impossible chord shapes that even the original guitarist tries to avoid when playing them live, which is why the song Shape of My Heart is co-written and performed by guitarist and composer Dominic Miller and apparently It started as an exercise which, all things considered, didn't really surprise me, so let's get started, so this whole

riff

is based on a descending baseline in the key of F sharp minor for nine on the A string and it's like this kind of boring correct interpretation. just the bass on its own, so let's turn it into chords and the

most

obvious option with these bass notes is to play a progression called Andalusian Cadence.

It's a typical Spanish chord progression that sounds like this and the key of F sharp minor is the original key. of this song sounds like this, wait a second because we clearly heard that this riff has to be played with your fingers correctly, so there is a particular picking pattern that I love, it's called Travis talking and for those who don't know, we made a video full over You can see it here and this is what it sounds like with these same meditation chords which actually sounds great but I want to spice this up with two new ingredients so first we add a seventh chord and second we add suspension so that the seventh chord on the fifth chord of this progression, by the way, any five chord in a minor key, in this case, C sharp minor, the last chord we can turn it into a dominant seventh chord and that resolves beautifully back to the tonic F sharp. lovely minor, so now I do suspension, so I'm sure we've all seen it abbreviated as its 4 in this case, so when the chord changes from the D chord to the sharp seven, a note of that D chord is keeps it configured again.

C sharp seven creating a C sharp seven sus4 back to C sharp seven and then solving by graph sharp minor, so it's kind of classic, lovely, anyway, it sounds like that, it's okay, but it's not really great, we need two new ones ingredients, syncopation and diffusion, try it. so first try, okay, we're playing bar chords

right

now and whenever I can I try to avoid playing bar chords, it's actually a bit annoying, so I'm just playing the three notes we need to make any major or chord minor, so in this case only three, so this is an extended Riot instead of those Triads, so try it and then we play these extended Triads using a syncopated rhythm, so this is where the accents are in the times out of time or even between the octave. note, so when seeing a patient, the notes are in unexpected places, so they spread disturbances and syncopations, it sounds like this, there is a meditation, wait a second, I'm forgetting the bass because to that syncopation we need to add something to call bass This is where the bass note of the new chord actually comes in just before the new chord is played, so in this case the chord changes on the first beat, the downbeat, and on the third beat, just before the beat one and just before beat three, we actually played the root of the new chord, so the syncopation anticipated the extension of the bass.

Triads combined sounds like this, did you catch that last central transition? We eliminated the anticipated basis completely and moved very quickly from D to C sharp, that's something that many seem like Miss, but we're still nowhere near the original and that's because we're getting something wildly wrong. Some of you may have already noticed this, but the chords we're playing are actually not the ones used in this riff, so in Rigby Auto. The interview with Sting Dominic Miller showed us that it was classical music that led him to write this riff using sixth chords and that is exactly what happens in the second and third chords of this riff, so when we go from F sharp to E major in that E chord we raise the fifth so that it becomes a sixth, so right after the F sharp minor chord to E6 and in D we do the same, the D chord we raise the fifth to the sixth, we place the third on top oh D6 and then to C sharp sus4 sounds great so like this there is a much friendlier way to play with these new chord shapes that we now create this is a bit complicated we can adjust the same notes the same chords changing just one fingering to make it sound more soft when we transition between the chords in F sharp minor instead of this I play it like this E6 instead of this you play much easier it sounds like this but there is a big problem because I think we are using the term sixth chords wrong, so there is A much more obvious way to explain these chord inversions is that the second and third chords are actually played as a first inversion, so instead of calling this E6 or this, it's just a C sharp minor played on the first inversion C sharp minor over e the second chord. from saying D6 is just a B minor played as a first inversion of B minor over D and then we get that C sharp seven, so you can see in a more traditional style of note setting called figured bass, the 6 symbol actually refers to a specific voicing of a chord or an inversion, the first inversion to be more specific, so I think that's what Dominic Miller was talking about when he mentioned those six chords, so even though the guitar is playing that B minor chord as first inversion B minor over D, he himself is playing the B as a bass note underneath, so technically this is not even an inversion because you always have to look at the entire composition and find the lowest note played to determine if it is officially an inversion or not and what's even cooler right away is that now, the second time, when we repeat everything, the new F sharp chord is also an inversion, it's in F sharp, it's a D over F sharp, so we move index finger to fret seven inversion first inversion first inversion again through the sound of C sharp seven then and now with Sting on bass, the first two rounds sound like this, yeah, amazing, so if you think this was complicated, the The next two chords are perhaps the

most

painful ever played on the guitar and I remember playing this song when I was younger and I just couldn't pull it off, but before I go there, I love acoustic guitar and that's exactly why the one where I made guitar chords just for the acoustic.

It's called Acoustic Adventure. The starting point is this interactive map where you can explore everything. the wonderful things the acoustic guitar has to offer, from swamp-fingered Style Blues to strumming and all the chords you ever want to know and from that slab of John Mayer 2 Travis type percussive guitar picking if you love acoustic, I think this course is an absolute no. -Rather, check out acusticadventure.com, so now, with those two cores that haunted me at night, first we go back to that B minor over D chord that we've seen before, nothing spicy, but now we have to add . that ring finger on the 5th fret on the high E string while we hold this down, it's really tricky to get this down, the pinky doesn't need to touch the high E string, it also goes over that 7th fret and then the ring finger is almost on the edge it's really very complicated to understand this, it's really complicated and what surprises me the most is that Dominic Miller actually tries to avoid playing this chord when he plays it live, he usually does this kind of variation and then goes to the new chord, but one thing I noticed is there was a video of him playing the chord and I heard hey hey the note sounds I didn't see him play the chord okay so look at his left hand you hear the high note but he doesn't worries, let's do it again slowly, so I was wondering what was going on, so my best guess is that he tuned his high E string up to an F and then placed his index finger on the fourth fret, which is much easier. but did he really do that?

I'm not sure if this surprises me a bit, but let's move on, so you play the chord, you master it, you nail it, you're very happy, excited, the

hard

part is over. Well, the next chord may ruin you again, so we move on to that chord, it actually is and it's just the strangest score. I mean, it's not very difficult, it's a chord played as a G major form, so it's derived from the open G chord. you move it up two frets and then your index finger marks the second fret and I don't think it's actually playing the D string on many plays.

You see it below as a compass, which is definitely possible, but I analyzed all the live footage of it. and I never saw him play that D string, so I don't think he plays it, which makes it a little easier. You just play your index finger on the 2nd fret of the G string and do a hammer from two to four and this. it's pretty springy, oh wow, then you wait a second again because there's a very easy answer to playing these difficult chord shapes and it's just using an open string, the open D string, it's there and then to the a chord, the to open.

The string is very obvious but it has a different sound, so I guess that's why Dominic Miller doesn't do the whole open string approach, but if you want to get close to the sound, that's your best option, continue on C sharp seven and then we finish. with a kind of lovely focal line on D G sharp minor 11 and F sharp minor so that everything together with the bass sounds like that, never say it doesn't sound strange over and over again and the best part about the middle of the song is that everything modulates up to a quarter for C sharp minor and you play exactly the same chords, exactly the same thing, but now all one string up and you need to arrange some chord shapes for the B string and the G string, it sounds like this, thanks and then it goes back to C sharp minor and there you have it in full, it's so beautiful and to put my money where my mouth is, here's a little clip from just a few weeks ago where Mary Spender, my friend, was visiting me and I jokingly said to her: can you sing? this song and without any preparation, the moment that really sparked the idea for this full video, we launched anyway thanks for watching, check out Acoustic Adventure if you love acoustic guitar as much as I do and I hope to see you next time you have a beautiful the day tells the gods as a meditation those he plays never suspect that he does not play for money wins does not play abroad the laws of success of a probable outcome the numbers leader died I know that space is the swords of the soldier I know Than the suits, I know diamonds mean money in your eyes, but that's not the shape of my heart.

Nice, thank you, thank you, thank you, what can we see? Okay, so this sheet music you can keep on the guitar, if you can play it. At one point, oh my god, why would you write a song with this chord?