Today’s transcription is from Umphrey’s McGee’s performance of the Beatles’ classic “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” with Jake Cinninger’s solo from the ending coda in D minor. As always, just go make use of the transcription if you like, or read below if you want to hear me yammer on about it.
And of course, continue to recognize that a deeply un-American and lawless cabal is currently in power in the U.S., an administration which deserves nothing but scorn, ridicule and disrespect at all times and from all people.
Song structure
Before considering Cinninger’s solo, let’s take a quick look at the song’s structure; well not the whole song, but just the section that this transcription involves. This part is in 6/8 time, and the chord progression is [: Dm Dm/E | Dm/F | E7b9 | Bb7 | A+ :], a somewhat unusual 5-measure repeating figure. This stretch of chords might or might not look a little strange to your eyes; I’m sure others have more nuanced harmonic things to say about it than me, but I look at it as arising in a straightforward way in a D minor setting.
Starting with a Dm tonic (i) chord, one of the most normal things you might do is move between it and a V chord, A7 (which chord gives us a C# and so a D harmonic minor flavor), giving basic tonic-dominant movement like this:
Besides arpeggiating as written above, playing back-and-forth between the full chords Dm (5-7-7-6) and A7 (5-x-5-6-5) you hear the classical-tinged resolution and nice voice-leading: your ear pulls you back from the A7 to the Dm.
A natural way to add some more harmonic movement is to use a secondary dominant, like the V-of-V, so here an E7 chord moving to the A7 before heading home to Dm. Something like this:
We can go further and spice things up a little bit more by inserting a Bb7 after the E7 before moving to the A7. The Bb7 is a tritone substitution for E7; it can play the same harmonic role as the E7 in terms of pulling toward the A7: note that the third of E7 (G#) is the same as the seventh of Bb7 (Ab), and the seventh of E7 (D) is the same as the third of the Bb7 (D). But it also gives nice half-step movement from the Bb root to the A root. With this addition we have a 5-measure progression that is harmonically very close to what you hear in the song:
Tweaks to two of the chords give another voice-leading connection through the progression: if we make the E7 an E7b9 we get an F as the b9, and if we replace A7 with an A+, i.e. A augmented, we get A C E#(F) acting like an altered seventh chord now; we then have a common tone F between all the chords in the progression. Throw in a nicely-shaped D minor bass line weaving through things, and we get the final form of this part of the song. Here is a simple fingerstyle arrangement to play the chords and bassline together (where I’ve now moved things to use some open strings for playability; also note the F at first fret on the high E string featuring throughout):
All of that really just to say: what might look harmonically complex on the surface is centered on a straightforward movement: starting at home in Dm, then moving to a tense E7 (in the form of E7b9, and along with its Bb7 substitution), which then resolves to a still-tense A7 (now in the form of A+), which itself resolves back to Dm, and repeat. Now let’s see what Cinninger plays over this.
Cinninger’s solo
The language
So the band is constantly moving back-and-forth between its comfortable Dm home and the tension arising from the other chords, and everything can be considered to be happening in the key of D minor. As such, it’s not surprising that Cinninger builds this solo largely off of D minor pentatonic (D F G A C, or 1 b3 4 5 b7) language, which lays on the fretboard like so (with the minor pentatonic scale shapes repeating as the D minor triads repeat up and down the neck):
But as we’ve seen from Cinninger before in a D major pentatonic setting, here too he adds in just one more note from D minor to his language in this solo: the E (degree 2, or the 9, however you like to call it here). With that note in play, we can think of Cinninger as playing out of the entire D minor scale except for the Bb, or as playing ambiguously between D aeolian (natural minor) and D dorian (the same way that D minor pentatonic is ambiguous between D aeolian, dorian and phrygian, having all the notes common to those three modes), or employing a Dm (D F A) and C (C E G) triad pair, or as playing a “D minor-pentatonic-add-9” hexatonic scale, or any other ways to conceive of it.
If you’re plenty comfortable playing minor pentatonics but not as much playing 7-note major/minor modes, then the latter is probably the easiest way to think about it: we’re just adding one little extra spice to our D minor pentatonic. And anyway, what’s really important is just having the sound in your ear, and knowing how to get to it with your fingers. Here’s how our D minor-pentatonic-add-9 lays on the fretboard (where I’m restricting to the top 4 strings because, for one, so does Cinninger when playing the E in this solo, but also because the limited placements of the E that this makes available can usefully help tie the sound of it in this context to the locations where you’re playing it).
For example, here is a short phrase using the E, repeated exactly in four different positions. Feel the association between its sound and where you’re playing it.
For something a little more musical than my silly phrase, here is James Hetfield’s solo from “Nothing Else Matters” (transposed here from E minor to D minor, and already in 6/8 time like our current piece), where he plays it all out of the top of probably everyone’s favorite minor pentatonic box, and adds in the 9 sound at a couple of nice points:
What Cinninger does with it
Here’s the overall arc of the solo:
- Measures 1-11: slow-paced, with lots of long sustained notes, many of them bends, and freely using the added 9 sound
- Measures 12-13: tremolo-picked double stops building up to …
- Measures 14-15: more long sustains at the very top of the instrument’s range
- Measure 16: a faster descending sequential run in minor pentatonic
- Measures 17-18: “marching in place” with a continued fast-paced, palm-muted sequential minor pentatonic run
- Measures 19-21: ascending back up at the fast pace and re-incorporating the added 9 sound as he goes
- Measures 22-26: finishing things off with a mix of the sustained bends and another fast flourish, and ending on a beautifully harsh artificial harmonic where he frets an E (our added 9), but prebends it to the F tone that has been droning throughout before releasing it down to end on that E
A nice touch in the song is that it ends on the A+ chord rather than “at home” on Dm, and Cinninger correspondingly ends on the E. It’s handy to look at all of the long sustained notes he plays in the solo, and which ones he places where. Every one of the D minor pentatonic notes (except for the F that is common to all the chords, interestingly) gets at least one long sustain during the solo. And the added E note gets 4 long sustains: once on the E7b9 chord, and every other time on the A+ chord.
So Cinninger is really tying that sound to the A+ chord here, and it’s a really tense choice, because the E clashes nicely with the E# (F) of the A+ chord. Since he mostly chooses to linger on the E only on that chord, it seems a deliberate choice (either by his mind or his ear), especially the way he ends on the very nasty (and I mean that as a compliment) artificial harmonic.
As always, you’ll get a lot more out of just listening and playing to Cinninger’s work itself than reading what I have to say about it. So maybe just go do that, and don’t forget to laugh at and shame a fascist or two today.