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Fixing it
In other Steve Morse news, he was recently featured in the American Musical Supply series Punch In with the Pros.
Steve Morse, legendary guitar virtuoso, came through our studio and played a little game that we like to call “Punch In with the Pros”! We had Steve listen to the track “Fix You” by Coldplay, without the guitar solo, and had him fill in some of his famous soaring melodies and improvise a brand-new solo of his own. If this doesn’t fix you, then nothing will.
The original, for reference:
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Steve is an excellent musician, but there is a reason why the Coldplay guitarist listened to more The Edge and U2 rather than Steve and Dixie Dregs or Deep Purple. The respective roles of the guitar are radically different, Coldplay doesn’t feature a lead guitar in a 70s blues-based sense, the guitar is part of the overall ambience of what is essentially a keyboard/piano-led band.
Coldplay’s music lives from projecting grand emotions, however fake, from a sparse musical background. Everything is set to make Chris Martin’s vocals evoke a maximum of feel from the audience – that isn’t Steve’s musical world at all, he likes to be a busy bee and play challenging stuff. Music for the mind rather than the heart.
And I’m afraid that Steve has never heard much U2, The Alarm, Big Country, Simple Minds, The Smiths, The Cure, Radiohead, Snow Patrol or Coldplay at all, he seems relatively unaccustomed to that type of music and the role of guitars in it which is NOT to lead with solos, fills and riffs but create an atmosphere. [You can play U2’s With Or Without You with just one chord – an ostinato Bm7 without the fifth (F#) – while the bass changes from root note D to A to B to G, the unchanging chord of just three notes (B, D & A) will work every time, yet sound different as the root notes change. That exemplifies the role of the guitar in these bands.]
September 11th, 2025 at 02:23Ohhh Uwe! The Coldplay link must be rattling your cage a bit 😁
I’m amazed how SM plays so elegantly with his massive problems in his wrist 😊
Well ‘Fix You’ is a cute song, and I enjoy SM’s input here 😃
September 11th, 2025 at 06:54While there is no denying the amazing popularity of Cold Play and it’s fantastic base, I just feel that thier music structure is repetitive and one dimension.
September 11th, 2025 at 09:07Now some might say that it’s their own signature but one of the reasons why I love DP catalogue of albums is due to the fact that no two albums sounds the same.
The diversity of their music is so rich.
That’s only my opinion.
Peace ✌️
“Fix You” is your typical made to order “flash your cell phones now” stadium hymn by Coldplay, they thrive on this stuff and do it well.
It’s “girls’ pop rock” for an audience looking for an uplifting communal event and not giving a damn what the guitarist plays – who am I to criticize? I never said that Coldplay do not know what they are doing.
Kings of Leon is another band Steve should have perhaps listened to to acquaint himself with that type of music. 😎
Essentially, pairing Steve with a Coldplay song is as incongruous as having Tony Iommi guest on an Eagles number. I have a hunch that David Gilmour or even Ritchie would have laid down a – not necessarily technically spectacular – solo to Fix You in one or two takes without too much fuss (or fuzz for that matter!). But Steve for all his ideas seems kinda stumped at what to do with the song.
Make no mistake: Steve doesn’t play a single “wrong” note to Coldplay’s piano chords, but all those pinched and tapped notes, the sparingly used, but still grating shredding runs, his very American country’esque choice of notes – it just doesn’t fit.
I’m surprised that Steve with all his decades of experience had such timing issues with the song – Waddy Wachtel he certainly ain’t and I share his self judgement that he is “not a session player”. At one point he says “you can play anything over that diatonic backing”, yet he manages to find something especially ill-fitting to the song in both takes 😂. (Some of his fade-ins or swelling notes approach being nice – let’s give credit …)
Or maybe, just maybe, Jonny Buckland of Coldplay is a lot better a guitarist than I have so far given him credit for,
https://youtu.be/Ul3aud6KTRw
his “solo” in Fix You certainly hits the sweet spot and supports the hymnic character of the song.
September 11th, 2025 at 12:08