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

Welcome to the fourth and final part 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 Triple Position Shift, and Passing Diminished Chords.

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 # 7 – The Triple Position Shift
3:41 – Lick # 8 – The Passing Diminished Chord
5:20 – Recap

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Lick 7

In this lick, Mayer seamlessly shifts three positions and gets himself from (near) the headstock to the 12th fret in two beats.
This phrase is really simple but you can see how elegant it is.
Mayer is definitely thinking in E although he's improvising over a C#m chord -and as you know by now, that's because C#m is the relative minor of E major.
How do we know he's thinking in E for this three position shift?

In the first bar of the lick (measure 52) he outlines the E chord in the C shape

Then he outlines the E chord in the A shape

Then the E chord in the G shape

For the second bar of this lick (measure 53), he plays right down the E Hybrid Major Blues scale that we spoke about in lick 1.

Lick 8

We start off our final lick with a fragment of the A chord in the C shape.
Then Mayer plays an A7b9 chord – this acts as our passing diminished chord, which resolves nicely to to E.
To end his solo, Mayer opts for some classic E Major Pentatonic Blues licks in the E and G shapes (bar 56)