The Guitar Player's Resource
Welcome back! It is in the air, holiday lights, crazy shoppers. We will kick off the season with the theme song from one of the most-liked holiday shows, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" by Dr. Seuss. In this lesson I will be teaching you my version of "The Grinch" from my Christmas CD, "The Meaning Of Christmas". My version is just labeled "Grinch" and I will be showing you just the first section.
The first few bars of this song has a sassy riff that repeats in different places throughout the tune; the use of the Bb tritone gives it a sinister flavor. The main riff is repeating while I'm shredding over the top of it. Basically, this whole tune is based in Em, and I mainly use the E Dorian scale (E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D) mixed with the blues scale (E, G, A, Bb, B, D) and I will occasionally add the E harmonic minor scale (E, F#, G, A, B, C, D#) for the soloing. In this first section we wont be hitting the harmonic minor though. You will notice the relationship between all those scales and how similar they are. For the intro solo section of this tune I use a wah, but on the slow sound clip I didn't use the wah so you could hear the notes better. I pretty much stick with this solo, but I do improvise a little. Just take it slowly, and work up to the 32nd notes.
MP3 - Grinch, Fast
MP3 - Grinch, Slow
OK, that's it for this lesson! Ok, that is it for now! If you are interested in checking out my CD "The Meaning Of Christmas" and others, you can order them right off this site. Visit mikecampese.com for more information.
Mike Campese is an all-around music performer, session artist and teacher competent in many musical styles, electric and acoustic. He has studied at G.I.T. (Honors Graduate), and with Paul Gilbert, Norman Brown, Stanley Jordan, Scott Henderson and Keith Wyatt.
