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I was almost in tears practicing a 55 year old riff!
And it wasn’t because my playing was so bad; no, it was because of how my soul was uplifted by the sound from a beloved chord sequence emitting from my fingers!
Steve Howe wrote this while he was a starving guitar player with Bodast. Steve joined Jon Anderson and company in the prog rock group Yes. This riff was incorporated into Yes’s track “Starship Trooper” released on their 3rd album (The Yes Album) in 1971.
More specifically it’s the 3 1/2 minute long outro known as The Wurm. I started thinking about it yesterday morning and looked it up on Ultimate Guitar. The lead guitar part is 3 chords repeated over and over. It’s going to take me a while to be able to play them cleanly up to speed, but it was just glorious to be able to play something (as imperfectly as it was) that has moved me for so many years. I hope to post a *video next week, abridged of course, hopefully I’ll have my pinky trained by then.
It’s 3 chords but only one shape, a modification of the awkward G chord Tony teaches us occasionally with pinky on the high E, ring on the low E.
Mod: middle goes to the D (-1 fret) and the index to the B (-2 frets)
*(And yes, I did already record myself just so I would have a benchmark)
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1 Reply
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That fun. It is great to find some musical piece that calls you to a meaningful time or place in your life and then to realize that you see the path to actually play it. That’s happened to me with Here, There, and Everywhere by the Beatles. I’ll post it sometime this year. Great win.
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