Earlier in the year, I decided to make a study of T-Bone Walker’s guitar style, and “I Walked Away” was the first tune that I attempted to transcribe. When I got to the nitty gritty of it though, namely the second and third bar of solo proper, I was having trouble hearing it so I put it down for a while. My method then was to sit with my plugged in guitar and the tune on YouTube, clicking the cursor on the big dot to replay one or two second pieces.
Eventually, I bought the CD so I could listen to it more comfortably. I started working on it again about a week ago and instead of just working with the computer, I started to run through the solo using a Gibson guitar to get the right sound and listening to the CD intermittently. Before long, I struck gold, unraveling the chromatic section that begins with the last note of measure two (second chorus) and carries into measure three: D – Db – Cb – C natural. I headed back to YouTube to work on the overall rhythmic structure and found it helpful to pencil the notes into the tab that you see below.
“I Walked Away” is in the key of Ab in four-four time. The metronome marking of quarter = 196 may seem a little scary, but remember that the lead guitar is mainly playing eighth notes against a fast walking bass playing quarters. Essentially, you have to be able to play sixteenth notes at 100 BPM to cut the solo. The hard part is that almost every note is picked, there are constant string crossings and little arpeggios, and nothing is repeated except for in the intro figure. Note: Some of the half-step bends are a hair more than a half-step, but definitely not a whole step. Same for the quarter step bends – do I hear three-eighth bends? Also, note the rests, such as the eighth note rest in measure four of the intro – it’s not a ‘7.’ And in the intro, the pickup notes are not played the last time around (the four bar intro figure repeats three times).
I finally found a use for the second channel of my Fender 65 Deluxe Reissue, putting a Boss Dr. Rhythm that I use for a metronome through there and plugging the guitar, a Les Paul Classic, through channel one aka the reverb channel with the reverb turned off. I started practicing at around 150, which was fairly easy. However, 150 is a long way from 196.
I kept increasing the tempo, which moved up in increments of four – 154, 158, 162, and so on. If I nailed it at a certain tempo in one try, I sometimes immediately moved up to the next tempo. At 186, you know you’re close. But then there is a bigger jump from 190 to 196, which is T-Bone territory. I pushed the metronome to 202, and then took a stab at playing to the record. After a few tries I was able to keep up but of course pushing the speed even harder is the name of the game. It’s really exciting when you get it going and a super practice session. Have fun!
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