Today here’s a transcription of a short solo from Jake Cinninger, from a cover of The Marshall Tucker Band’s classic rock song Can’t You See by Umphrey’s McGee and a couple of guys from Greensky Bluegrass. Cinninger’s solo is from 1:45-2:30 in the video embedded below. Feel free to go make use of it with no further ado, or keep reading below if you want my ramblings about it. And be sure to enjoy the other fine performances besides Cinninger’s.
The chord progression here is super straightforward: D – C – G – D, and repeat. D is very much the tonic, so the song is in the key of D mixolydian (D E F# G A B C, or scale degrees 1 2 3 4 5 6 b7 from a D tonic), not uncommon for blues-based rock. And this exact progression is plenty common too: take it down a half-step to Db – Cb – Gb – Db and you’ve got the verses for Sweet Child o’ Mine; take it down another half-step to C – Bb – F – C and you’ve got Oh! Sweet Nuthin’. (Apostrophes in mixolydian song titles aren’t mandatory, but apparently encouraged.)
Just about all of Cinninger’s solo can be seen as anchored around D major triad (D F# A) shapes. Here are D major voicings along the neck on the GBD strings (note that the root D is marked as squares, and two of the voicings are repeated an octave up):
For the purposes of this solo, you can forget the lowest voicing, which Cinninger doesn’t touch. These triad voicings appear in the transcription’s notation at the points when Cinninger moves from one position to another.
The rudimentary language of this solo is D major pentatonic (D G F# A B, or degrees 1 2 3 5 6 from a D tonic/root). Here’s how D major pentatonic lies around our anchor voicings (where I’m ignoring the lowest two strings because Cinninger’s solo doesn’t involve them, but also because it simplifies our approach to getting these sounds in our ear, and wedded to these shapes under our fingers):
Here’s a simple major pentatonic lick played around each of our D triad voicings. Playing the same ideas in these different positions helps get your fingers and ears on the same page.
Cinninger kicks off the solo in measures 3-7 playing purely major pentatonics around the 7-7-7 voicing and then the 16-14-15 voicing. In measures 8-10 he plays very chromatically, culminating in walking a repeating figure down from the 16-14-15 position to the 12-11-10 position.
This leads to the next short phase of the solo, where he brings an additional flavor to the mix, adding the 4 (G) to the D major pentatonic he’s been playing. There are plenty of ways to think about this: that you’re blending D major pentatonic (D E F# A B) and G major pentatonic (G A B D E); that you’re playing the Dickey Betts hexatonic scale; that you’re just playing the 1 2 3 4 5 6 in D, omitting the 7 or b7 so as to be ambiguous between D major and D mixolydian. However you think of it is fine; the main thing is having the sound in your ear and being able to bring it out with your hands.
Note that the new G note is something of an “avoid note” on the D chord, where it can clash with F#, so you usually wouldn’t want to linger too long on it there; but at the same time, it is of course a chord tone of the C and G chords that make up half the progression. So it brings some tension on the D chord, while being very representative of the underlying progression.
Anyway, enough of that. Here is how this added flavor (in red) looks on the fretboard when situated alongside D major pentatonic around our triad voicings:
Note that one nice thing about restricting where we’re playing is that we don’t have tons of different location/fingering options for seeking out this sound; you’ll get a definite association between the sound of the 4 (G) and where you’re playing it, if you do it enough. For example, try this phrase in all the positions:
For one more hint at how this sound is emblematic of much mixolydian rock, and why some would call it the Dickey Betts scale, here’s one way you might play the (transposed) melody from the Allman Brothers’ Jessica in our positions:
You’ll find that Cinninger is hitting this sound a lot over measures 10-14, before finishing up the solo with a return to purely major pentatonic sounds in measures 15-18. All in all, a very nice, short solo that you could’ve listened to at least a dozen times instead of reading all the way down to here if you did, which honestly might be a lot more fruitful.
Keep playing and listening to music, and keep refusing to accept a world where masked thugs are roaming American streets as unidentified secret police, disappearing people without due process. It is barbaric, shameful and unacceptable.