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It’s mostly clean, maybe a bit of reverb. The rhythm parts are clean and you need to get the muting right so you get nice distinction between playing the chords and the mutes inbetween. There are slightly different approaches depending on whether it’s classic 60s, 2 Tone or 3rd Wave but mostly it’s small chords ( 3 or 4 note versions of major and minor chords, probably rarely use any more extended harmonies) and using the basic eighth note ska rhythm. Avoid open chords, if you use standard barre chords that’s fine but you’ll only really be hitting the thinnest four strings.
The word ‘ska’ is said to come from the sound of the guitar. It’s often doubling what the keyboard player is doing so that might help.
If you count a bar of 4/4 as ‘one and two and three and four and’ you hear the chord on the ands and a muted strum on the numbers. You don’t want to really clank the muted parts, just a light touch. Ideally your fretboard hand should be releasing tension to mute the chords whilst holding the shape so it’s nice and sharp.
You can throw in a slide from a fret below into a chord sometimes, thats quite common.
Ideally for the 60s stuff you’d use a more early reggae style approach where it’s all down strokes. But lots of people don’t and use up strokes for the chords and at faster tempos it’s not really workable to stick with all down strokes or at least harder to hear the difference. If this is a bit confusing you can probably ignore it and just do what feels comfortable.
Often there’s a second guitar in ska and this tended to be my role. Fairly standard fills and short solos. You can also play damped parts where you are doubling the bass line or ‘rattle’ style parts where it’s an alternate dampened part on the low strings usually based on arpeggios.
You could use delay for some dubbier elements. There’s some of this in The Specials and Madness so used sparingly that can work. Chorus or flanger used lightly can sweeten up rhythm parts and you’ll hear that in bands like The Beat. I think they had short delays sometime as well but they were listening to Afro pop a lot by then.
For solos I’d use a bit of distortion just to add a bit of sustain and dynamic. There are some distorted parts in Madness and old school artists like Toots and the Maytalls will have quite bluesy distorted guitar for their solos live.
The singer in my band did most of our rhythm parts and he wasn’t 100% rock solid whilst singing at the same time. However, if he lost the chord progression he’d just keep ploughing on with a hard muted strum and we didn’t always notice.
But that 8th note ska rhythm and a guitar plugged into an amp should probably get you through the dep gig.
The ska sound is short sharp chops on the chords with no ringing out. Usual patterns are the 1 4 and 5 chord progression.
have fun
What kind of ska do you play? Is it original (Toots, Desmond Dekker, The Upsetters), 2nd wave (Specials, The Selecter), or 3rd wave (Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Buck-O-Nine)?
I'm off to see The Specials in Coventry in July, I'll keep a plectrum in my pocket in case they need a last minute dep.
The apple don’t fall far from the tree...
Announced in the last couple of days. I’d have to admit the 02 Institute on a Tuesday in January isn’t a super thrilling prospect. Hmm.