Chord of the week 3/9/16 - a B5add9(noRoot) by Stevie Ray Vaughan in Let's Dance by David Bowie

bigjon

Following last week's Stevie Ray Vaughan tribute on the anniversary of his death, here's another SRV-ism that I played in the same solo. He derived it from Albert King's trick of bending down from the high string of an upside-down strung guitar & catching the other strings on the way.
For my 'Things That I Used To Do' solo, I was in the key of G, so a fretted the C at the 8th fret at the top string & bent it up to D, meanwhile catching the 2nd string and bending that up from a G to an A. As I was playing over a D chord at the time the notes D and A give a boring old D5 chord, but over the key chord of G it gives a more interesting and mysterious G5add9(noRoot), and this is how SRV himself used it in the most famous of many instances, his solo at the end of Bowie's Let's Dance. That's in the key of Bm so the chord is

B5add9(noRoot): x x x x 10(->12) 10(->12)

you can hear it at 3:43 in Let's Dance and at 1:17 in my Things That I Used To Do solo

bigjon

Chord of the week index updated with 162 discussions at
http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/598/chord-of-the-week-index

bigjon

Edit - just realised as I was entering another B5add9 chord next to this in the index that I've got the wrong fret! It should be bending up from the 12th fret to the 14th! Can't be bothered to re-do the YouTube links so I'll just leave the correction here as a comment rather than editing the original post ;-)