John Mayer Guitar Lesson - Brown Eyed Women Solo Tab - Dead and Company 7/23/16 - PART 3

Welcome to part 3 of John Mayer's solo on Brown Eyed Women. In this lesson we're going to look at two more note for note licks from John Mayer's solo on the July 23rd 2016 version of this Grateful Dead tune, as played with Dead & Company at the Gorge Amphitheater.

This lesson will focus on two of Mayer's signature techniques, the One Finger Root bend, and Harmonized 6ths.

If you haven't checked out the previous part of this series, do that before you move on.

Grab your guitar, and let's get started!

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► Timestamp/Chapters
0:00 – Introduction
0:12 – Lick # 5 – The One Finger Root Bend
3:06 – Lick # 6 – Harmonized 6ths
5:20 – Recap

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Lick 5

This lick is a really pretty one, he's playing out of the E major scale in the C shape for the first bar.
As we alluded to before, C#m is the relative minor of E, which is why the E major scale works over both chords.
If you want to be very technical, you can say that he's thinking C# minor over this, and you'd be correct

E Major Scale – C Shape

What's cool about this lick is that he does a full bend towards the root of C#m (end of bar 48).
I know John is a big fan of B.B King, Freddie King, and Albert King, and I've heard each of them use this technique in different songs.
It's a classic blues bend, and it gets easier the further up the neck you go.

In bar 49, for the E chord, he starts off with a blues lick in the E shape of E, and then another major blues lick in G shape of the E major pentatonic. We've talked about these scales in previous parts of this series, but here are the shapes in case you'd like a refresher:

Lick 6

Over the B chord, in bar 50, is the E major scale harmonized in 6ths on the G and high E strings.
This is a classic part of both blues and country vocabulary, its a staple of both John Mayer's and Jerry Garcia's styles.

E Major Scale Harmonized in 6ths – G and E Strings