![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/mcbride6.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/airey3.jpg)
To help you cross in transition
Guitar World posts Steve Morse’s tutorial on wide intervals.
Steve has kindly agreed to this unique tutorial on big intervals, a core component of his trademark style. He defines big intervals as anything larger than using adjacent notes, such as playing a linear scale (eg root, second, third). Typically, big intervals involve skipping strings, and he does this in both his compositions and general playing to outline chords.
Thanks to BraveWords for the heads-up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Thanks for the wonderful Steve Morse tutorial. So much melody and colour in his playing which had him stand well out from the pack of other ‘new’ guitarists in the early 80’s. I recognise a few of those pieces from his previous music. Cheers.
March 4th, 2026 at 10:22🤡🤣
March 4th, 2026 at 12:57He’s very good at this stuff, it’s orchestral.
Totally different concept to Ritchie’s chordal and rhythm guitar minimalism. Unless he was shooting off a flurry of notes during one of his solos, Ritchie was the master of reduction, happy to play as little as possible and still make a song work.
March 4th, 2026 at 21:05Morse needs to do more Guitar Clinic in more places. He has talent in teaching, I enjoy a lot of his guitar tutorials videos. And that’s coming from me who didn’t know much about guitar parts, let alone how to play it like a professional musician.
March 5th, 2026 at 03:39That’s greek for me (or german?), I don’t play any instrument.
I would sound like this (at best):
https://youtu.be/DSKqw9f-luU?t=19
March 6th, 2026 at 10:01The way Steve writes and his guitar technique(s) in service of his songwriting are very much geared to his musical home turf: highly ornamentalized instrumental music, there is even something baroque to it. He makes the guitar sound like several instruments playing at once and he has the ability to do that without resorting to multitracking it in the studio.
In comparison, Ritchie is a sparse and sometimes even just skeleton player. His chordal structures are meat & potatoes compared to Steve’s exhaustive and very refined + lyrical harmonic embellishments.
Everything has two sides though: You do get Big Ian’s past concern that sometimes he wondered where and what to sing over Steve’s lavish and detailed guitar parts.
March 6th, 2026 at 18:19Probably not a problem for Ian Gillan at the beginning of Steve Morse’s tenure in Purple. However as time moves on and things change, yes the ideas start to wane and personalities rear their head more and more and something has to give. Mind you that would have occurred with Ritchie occasionally too no doubt. Less likely that would occur with McBride as he is more of a “jack in the box” type of player with so many influences and not as diverse and as ‘idiosyncratic’ as Morse and Ritchie. But who knows what goes on behind closed doors. If McBride or time itself wasn’t an issue, even Simon could end up on the wrong side of the ledger. Cranky ole curmudgeons eh? Can’t live with them, definitely can live without them. Cheers.
March 7th, 2026 at 22:04A difference might certainly be that Steve Morse has spend decades focused on the craft of creating jaw-dropping instrumental epics, not songs with vocals.
Ritchie has mostly worked with vocal-based riffs and progressions.
Two very different ways to approach music.
March 8th, 2026 at 23:00That and how Ritchie is used to playing with an organ covering for him, allowing him to reduce his rhythm backing to a bare minimum. RJD once said “Tony Iommi always came up with these strange and complex chords while Ritchie was happy to just plonk on the E string if the song didn’t need anything more.”
March 9th, 2026 at 15:29Those years spent as a session guitarist and learning to play for the song for Ritchie and others is a totally different approach indeed. The 1970’s wasn’t that at all in many ways. Good to have a different take on it though, playing songs all the time is boring as is also only doing the instrumental thing. That is why I lean towards a mix of both, extended instrumentation within songs. Or a certain amount of songs and then throw in some instrumentals too. Eric Johnson did that on his early albums and he most probably still does. King Crimson also travelled down that road. Cheers.
March 9th, 2026 at 19:56