Iced Ink guitar tabs were requested a few times when we lived in Brooklyn but I never had/made the time or energy. Now that we’re living in Minnesota and there’s a lot more of both, here’s round one: A few of the main chunks of “Spin Cycle” from the recording of it the band did this past July before Bryn and I moved back to Minneapolis. Another thing I’ve been wanting to learn forever is how to do split/multicam video editing and saw this as the perfect opportunity to do both… my goodness is that stuff ever frustrating to learn. If you ever want to get mad at a computer, try and teach yourself video editing.
There’s a link to the finished video featuring all of these parts at the bottom of this post. Neat! (Side note: there’s another entry I wrote a while back about this song and its many incarnations that you can read right here)
Here we go… oh, and here’s the song itself (which one can download at http://icedink.bandcamp.com if one wishes to do so):
Intro riff
Not much splainin’ to do here… just some notes and Dave Mustaine-inspired inverted power chords:
Let’s do some strumming and muting
And now for the strummy chordy stuff that starts at around :38 in the song. The only weird part about this is trying to keep the G string silent (insert your own G string joke here). I mute it as best as I can with my left index finger and strum lightly to “hide” it, but it doesn’t always work. There’s also some other string muting going on that’s pointed out in the video.
The Primus Part
Here’s the “Primus part” that starts at around 1:45. The way I originally did this was to put my pick in my mouth (or accidentally drop it) and pick the low E string bass notes with my thumb and play the upper-register chords with my “IMA” (in classical guitar terms) fingers. That yields the cleanest and most predictable results, but over the years I started holding onto the pick and just kind raking it over everything. Perfect shmerfect, as Ace Frehley once said, “Look, it’s rock n roll!” Also, if you don’t fret guitar notes with your thumb, I highly recommend trying it if your thumb allows. It makes the low E and G bass notes in this a lot easier on the fretting hand. Plus it’s another finger just sitting there behind the neck. Why not put it to work?
The weird Brian Setzer thing
Brian Setzer did a really cool move in one of his many brilliant solos in Gene Vincent’s “Double Talkin’ Baby” on the Stray Cats Rumble In Brixton album/DVD that made me laugh and rewind the solo a dozen or so times the first time I heard it just for that part… He lowered the fingerings of the 5th fret guitar tuning method a half step and played them with their corresponding open strings resulting in a lovely little cascade of goofy dissonance – as we were doing the recording of “Spin” in July I decided to throw my own spin on that after almost every “Primus part”. Here’s what that looks like – picking-wise I start the first note (D# on B string) with my pick and pick every other note with my F-U finger. Each fretted note is played with pick, each open string is picked with the F-U finger. It looks like this:
There’s 10 or 11 other tunes from this recording session that I plan on dissecting when those are released to the masses, but in the mean time I hope you enjoyed this complimentary “Spin” lesson. Please leave suggestions and comments in the large waste bin in the corner of the room with the can of gas and matches next to it.
