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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 06:54