Chords for The Court Of The Crimson King by King Crimson – Guitar Lesson Preview

[E] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [F#] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ [Em] _ _ _ [A] _ _ [F#] _
_ _ _ _ [E] _ _ [F#] _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [Em] _ _ _
[A] _ _ [Am] _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [F] _ _ _ [E] _ _
_ [F#] _ _ _ _ _ _ [E] _
[Em] _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [C] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [G] _ [E] _ _ _ _
[F#m] _ [B] _ _ _ _ _ [C#m] _ [D#] _
_ [E] _ _ [Fm] _ [D] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [C] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [G] _ [B] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ [G] _
Hello, this song.
This album knocked me out when I got it as a teenager.
_ This is The Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson,
Ian MacDonald, [N] Robert Fripp, Michael Giles, Greg Lake, of course,
and Pete Sinfield wrote lyrics for them, played a little bit of stuff.
The song opens up, of course, with _ a melotron playing that chorus part there,
that really sweeping stuff.
Sounds great.
_ And then it goes into this nice little guitar part
that has got some spooky little harmonics and strange chord changes and things like that.
We just have a ton of stuff in this song.
[E] Some pretty fast cross-picking, _ _ _ [Em] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [E] _ _ which is how the third verse is done.
Some [G] harmonics, some notes you have to hold.
We're going to talk about playing that opening part, what I consider the verse to the song,
a few different ways, kind of depending on _ _ _ what feels better to you
and also how you want it to sound.
[N] _ _ Greg Lake has been performing this for the last couple of years, again,
_ resurrecting some early King Crimson songs, which is pretty cool.
_ _ _ He generally does the whole arpeggio thing over all the E minor chords.
So we're going to talk about all the chords.
We've got some _ slamming parallel [C#] octaves.
[C#m] _ _ [D#m] _ We're [E] going to talk about how to execute that.
_ [G#] _
_ There are some unusual chords, _ sort of normal chords,
but we pull in, [C] _ _ _ _ _
we really [A] have to, on the guitar, pull that melody out and make it [E] sound good.
_ _ [D] _ _ [B] _ _
[N] Something like that.
Anyway, so we will be taking a look here.
I've got tablature [E] to, it's only two pages.
There really isn't a lot of stuff for this nine-minute song.
Something unusual happens at the end.
There's a little tag where they play the chorus again in a different key,
where we hear something like this. _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[D] _ _ _ _ _ [C#] _ _ _
_ _ _ [G#] I'm not going to bother with that because it's just a [Am] little rehash of what was going on before,
but it [D#] does happen on the original album.
Anyway, we'll talk about the picking, we'll talk about getting the chorus in there,
and _ just some general fun stuff with the Court of the Crimson King. _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ In the last segment, we talked about [E] cross-picking.
[Em] _ _ [Bm] _ [G]
In this segment, we're going to talk about what [E] I call hybrid picking.
Different people call us different things.
And this is using the pick and your fingers to hit notes,
because what we're going to do here, if you take a look at the tab,
what I have on the very beginning, we've got a low E in the bass,
and then harmonics at the 12th fret of just the third and the first [Em] strings,
not all three of them.
_ We're going to do that in the second measure.
But in this first measure, we want to just hit the G, the 12th fret of the third string,
and the E, the 12th fret of the [F#] first string.
And I'm going to use two fingers [E] to pluck those.
_ [Em] _ _
So hit that [E] E in the bass with the pick,
but then [C] _ use your second and third fingers to hit those harmonics at the 12th fret. _
Now, [E] you [Em] could use the pick _ _ _ _ _ for one of them.
If you have trouble using two fingers for that,
use the pick on the G and your ring finger or your middle finger _ _ for _ the high one.
So that's the way [E] that measure is going to work.
[Em] _
Then I'm going to talk about a couple different ways of doing this.
And so the second half, which is virtually the same,
[D#] the third and fourth measures, I've got an alternate fingering [E] choice.
What I like to do here [Em] is keep both of those notes ringing,
and then we need an F sharp back here at the 7th fret [F#m] _ of the second [Em] string.
_ _ [F#] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ [B] _ [C#m] _
_ [D#] _ [E] _ _ [F] _ _ [D] _ _
_ _ _ Now, what I just did right there _ was I hit all six strings for every one of those [N] _ notes.
Now, what we have here is parallel octaves, so two notes that are an octave apart.
I'm playing the B here on the 5th fret of the A string
and the octave B on the 4th fret of the G string.
_ But I'm putting my hand down in such a way that all the other strings are dead.
This is going to take some practice.
Now, octaves on the_
which I'll get to in just a second, some of the techniques.
The _ octaves on these strings will be _ two frets apart
because the strings are two strings and two frets apart.
Because the strings are two and [D#] five frets apart, _ an octave is 12 frets.
So if I go from the [B] 5th fret_
I mean, from the 5th string to the 4th string,
that's the equivalent of five frets.
If I go to the next string, that's the equivalent of five.
I need two more to get to an octave.
So this is what octaves look like on _ 5th and 3rd strings.
Now, what I'm doing is laying my fingers [G] down here
so that they're all touching [Em] all kinds of stuff.
Like right here, I've got my first finger_
and I'm not playing it clean with a nice arch like that.
I'm kind of coming in_
my first finger is almost laying on all the strings
but just pressing down hard on the 5th string. _
And it's lightly touching the 6th string with the tip.
So I'm not playing the [N] _ 5th string with the tip of my finger like I normally would.
I'm a little bit more on the pad of it so that the tip is killing the 6th string.
And right now, [B] you can hear I've got the B clean
_ and that also is killing the 4th string, _ _ which_
that's how the 4th string gets killed.
So work on that in the first place.
What these strings should sound like now is dead, B, dead.
And I [G] might even have [C#] dead all the way, [G] _ but not here
because I have a little bit of an arch to this.
It doesn't matter.
That's the [G#] other string I'm going to be playing.
So really, my first finger is doing most of the muting here.
It's killing the first string [G] and the second string. _ _
Although my fourth finger is helping kill the second string too
because I have this on at the same type of slightly weird angle. _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _