Hitch a Ride by Boston Tom Scholz | acoustic | electric
An acoustic - electric guitar lesson on how to play the guitar parts to “Hitch a Ride” by Boston from their 1976 debut album.
From one of my favorite rock albums ever, "Hitch a Ride" is such a great song! The guitar solo IMHO, is one of the best ever recorded and has everything from blazing pentatonic licks to beautiful harmonized melodic phrases and a few pick slides as well! Tom Sholz is a great guitar player and plays a bit different than most guys. Although some of his licks are in familiar positions, some of them aren't, and some of them can only be played smoothly by overdubbing or punching in. I'll go over that in the solos lesson. He also has a really great feel on how to use guitar harmonies. He only puts them in here and there and by doing that, the effect is stronger and sweeter than if he harmonized everything. I used my wah pedal to get the tone for these solo parts. It's sort of a duel between doubled, hard panned guitars vs a single guitar down the middle. For the hard panned guitars, I had the wah about three quarters down, and for the center guitar, I had it all the way down. I could go on and on about the awesomeness of this solo, but I won't! I just remember when this record first came out, how blown away I was with the guitar sounds. Little did I realize back then that a lot of that was created by doubling and tripling the lead parts and that's what I did in my demo. I had originally thought to just do the acoustic guitar part, but one thing led to another and before I knew it, I was doing the whole thing, including the drums and the bass. Most of the time I like to keep my demos short, so I definitely got carried away with this one! Programmed drums are not great for a song like this. It really needs to slow down on the organ break, and the acoustic breakdown. Being "locked to the grid" makes those sections sound a bit robotic. BTW, the bass part is amazing! It took me longer to learn and record the bass than the guitars! I probably spent more time on my demo than Tom Shulz did on the original track! It was worth it though. I wanted to do the best I could to honor this fantastic song and the great guitar playing. I had a lot of fun making these videos so I hope you enjoy them and have fun playing this awesome song. Cheers Andy |
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