Synthesize Her (Pre-Chorus)

Greetings everybody! I hope you all had the most joyous of holidays! 

Time to circle back to one of my favourite tracks, Synthesize Her. We're going to look at the pre-chorus this week. The guitar here plays a sparse, spacey sounding part.

How to make things sound spacey:

This is more of a textural part than many of the others in previous weeks. That means it's not really in the forefront, but sits in the background and sounds like it's far away from you. Typically this is accomplished by using delay and reverb. Listen carefully to the video and you'll hear that each note I play repeats a few times over, each time sounding more distant. That's delay doing its thing. Reverb on the other hand emulates a physical space like a room, or hall. The more of these effects you apply, the more distance and space is implied. I like to apply a ton to evoke largest of places there is, outer space.

Technique Tips:

The first 4 chords are in the 4th position (if you're unsure how positions work, refer to last week). You'll then slide down to the 2nd position to play the 5th chord.

The second last chord is a big one. Be careful that your 4th finger doesn't lie too flat and mute and of the other strings. I recommend playing this chord 1 note at a time at first to make sure everything rings out clearly.

For the final chord, stretch that 1st finger out because it's going to barre across the top 4 strings on the 4th fret. 

Theory Talk:

This whole section is in the key of C# minor. It looks like this:

C# - D# - E - F# - G# - A - B

Most of the shapes I'm playing here are simple 2 note chords, separated by a 3rd. The first shape is C# + E, and the second is B + D#. 

The second last shape is a neat one. The 4 notes spell out an Amaj9 chord. In context this chord makes my eyes go just a little teary. It's beautiful.

TAB is attached as a PDF and Guitar Pro file. Happy noodlin'!