Learning Psychobilly style Guitar

LaGarton

Hi all,

I'm still new to guitar after buying my first one (Freshman Renegade Folk) in August last year but I sort of lost motivation after a few months but picked it back up at the beginning of this year. I'm still currently learning chords and I don't want to learn deep theory stuff but I'd love to be able to play psychobilly style guitar. If people don't know this style its a mixture of rockabilly and surf music but heavier sounding with horror influences.

Heres a link to the first proper psychobilly band The Meteors on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdBDldKgiiA Another more rock style example is here from Batmobile: http://https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ttecOi8_Xw

Any help on this matter is really appreciated and mods please move this thread if its in the wrong place!
Lloyd

xpia98jf

Learn some blues progressions, add some Chuck Berry shuffle rhythm and Bob's yer auntie!

stonevibe

Listen to Poison Ivy and cop her 'Chuck' licks.

DulcetJones

stonevibe said:

Listen to Poison Ivy and cop her 'Chuck' licks.

This.  And in case you don't know, Poison Ivy was the guitarist in the Cramps, a psychobilly band if there  ever was one.  She was also quite a babe in the 80's.

pintspiller

Get some trem, reverb, delay and echo pedals. 

LaGarton

pia98jf said:

Learn some blues progressions, add some Chuck Berry shuffle rhythm and Bob's yer auntie!

Pia, thanks for the advice. Blues progressions I'm guessing can be learnt from online but how could I learn shuffle rhythms?

stonevibe said:

Listen to Poison Ivy and cop her 'Chuck' licks.

Thanks, I shall give give this a go!

Rox

Learn rock n roll rhythms, then thrash the strings until your fingers bleed, then thrash them some more.    The Cramps are a great place to start. 

fields5069

DulcetJones said:

stonevibe said:

Listen to Poison Ivy and cop her 'Chuck' licks.

This.  And in case you don't know, Poison Ivy was the guitarist in the Cramps, a psychobilly band if there  ever was one.  She was also quite a babe in the 80's

I have the 7" shaped picture disc of "Bikini Girls With Machine Guns", which consists of a cut-out photo of Poison Ivy, in a bikini, with a machine gun. Genius.

I don't think the Cramps were exactly Psychobilly, but I guess there is common ground between them and groups like the Meteors, Guana Batz etc. They also covered obscure garage songs and so had some common ground with bands like the Fuzztones, which the UK bands didn't really have.

EricTheWeary

I think 'shuffle' can be misleading.* For rockabilly, rock and roll, psychobilly it's primarilly a straight eighths feel. So, basic rock and roll riffs, rythmn patterns and solo ideas. Lot of Chuck Berry style double stops on the leads.
12 bar blues progressions are used a lot in rockabilly, surf and ,presumably, psychobilly and they are quite easily recognised once you know them ( like the Batman theme). Most musicians know a basic 12 bar so if you want to play with others it's useful to know  basic ways to play along.
 Listening to the Meteors there isn't obviously anything unusual going on style wise so I think it may be about playing along - find a song you are most familiar with/ sounds most straightforward and try to plot out the landmarks. So, work out the basic chord progression ( listen to the changes and then start with a single note on your low E finding what happens), where the different sections are and try to work out the signature riff(s). It isn't a terrible idea to sit with pen and paper and work out the lyrics and how the song is structured first so by the time you pick up your guitar you know the song inside out. 

* I don't know how useful this is but:
Let's assume most rock music is in 4/4 or 4 beats to the bar. If you count along and tap your foot in time you'll see for every beat your foot goes down then up. So, if you played a note for your foot going down and one for it coming up those are eighth notes. Rock and roll, surf, etc,etc, has it's basic feel as (straight) eighth notes played across 4/4 time and you can hear that in a lot of guitar and bass riffs.Bah Bah Buh Buh Bah Bah Buh Buh.  
If you slow your foot going down and correspondingly faster coming up then play notes for those you have a slightly lopsided feel. Bahh Bu Bahh Bu Bahh Bu Bahh Bu. That's a blues shuffle. 
The rock and roll/ rockabilly/surf guys were taking the chord progressions and riffs of the blues but playing them with a straight eights feel. Hence if we say a shuffle it should mean the lopsided feel of blues but people also use it to mean blues style  rythmn guitar parts played with a straight eights feel. In particular those parts where you play a constant note plus a moving second note.** There will be loads of internet lessons on those types of patterns - seconds to show or paragraphs to explain!

** eg over an A chord the guitar is playing the open A string at the same time you have a  moving pattern on the D string, typically alternating between 2nd and 4th frets.


[Well, I'm sure that's as clear as mud]

LaGarton

Thanks Eric it did make sense to someone who has never looked at music really so you you're doing something right! So basically just learn some basic 12 bar blues stuff, keep at my chords and look at rock and roll riffs? I think I can do this...with luck!

octatonic

If you want to do it properly then dip your toe into Western Swing too and then play it at high speed:

LaGarton

octatonic said:

If you want to do it properly then dip your toe into Western Swing too and then play it at high speed:

Thank you for that....now I have even more reason to live with my guitar and abandon studying! Hopefully one day I can play something like that

octatonic

^ Jim Heath is the master- if you transcribed half a dozen of pretty much any of the RHH tunes you'd have a great grounding in the style.

EricTheWeary

LaGarton said:

Thanks Eric it did make sense to someone who has never looked at music really so you you're doing something right! So basically just learn some basic 12 bar blues stuff, keep at my chords and look at rock and roll riffs? I think I can do this...with luck!

That's a shorter way of putting it! There is an area of cross over between the blues and rockabilly/ rock and roll/surf/ psychobilly but there are differences too. Useful to know in some ways as, to some extent,you can take the same licks and make them fit each genre. 

At least from time to time I think it's good to really pull a song apart. Some people can just listen to a song but I find it's helpful to listen with pen and paper and start writing down how it's structured, the lyrics,etc, and you start getting really familiar with the main riffs and where the chord changes are. Next step then is to see what you can work out on the guitar. For something like psychobilly that's not a mainstream genre there probably won't be loads of tab or YouTube tutorials for individual songs so learning to transcribe the basics is how you are going to get to 'working' versions of songs. 

LaGarton

Thank you Eric, I will sit down and start learning some bluesy stuff tomorrow. I've never transcribed or pulled a song apart as the theory side has never appealed to me but I've worked out a basic chord progression in minor chords from what I know and song I've listened to...its all just a new curve to learn from