Cover of Rick’s ‘Golden Champagne’ Lesson

Hey Rohan

Great job dude! I’d probably work a little bit on the rhythmical aspect of the solo a little more. Don’t get me wrong, you did an awesome job but rhythmically it could be tighter.

Looking forward to the tapping lick 😉

Rohan, 🙂

Excellent job man! It looks/sounds as if you really put somke quality time into this piece and that you really enjoy playing it! 😉

If I’m clear about what Rick was referring to in regards to improving the rhythmic aspects of your lines etc, I believe what it comes down to is recognizing that “Golden Champagne” is essentially played as a “Half-Time Shuffle” feel. What makes this less obvious (and therefore a bit trickier to recognize” is the fact that Rick opted to keep the drum-track as more of a straight-ahead half-time-rock-feel, so there are no glaring/obvious “swing-elements” to the rhythm section per-se, but yet the guitar-melodies and the occasional rhythm-accents fall on the triplet-based boundaries of a half-time shuffle. This is actually a difficult thing for me to explain in a text-based message such as this, but to get an idea of what I’m talking about, perhaps check out the following tracks when you have an extra few minutes, as these of a similar rhythmic feel/fabric, OK?

“Beautiful Girls” – Van Halen
“Way Cool Jr.” – Ratt
“Unskinny Bop” – Poison (no, I’m NOT a big fan, but this track does have that rhythm!)
“Roseanna” – Toto

What you’ll notice about all of these tracks is that they have a sort of “cut-time” drum-feel, but still have an underlying triplet-based (think (2) groups of 3-sixteenth note triplets per beat – or six (6) notes total per pulse!) Thus, when you play lines against these rhythms, they MUST fall against these triplet-based rhythmic boundaries or else they’ll feel rhythmically disconnected from the shuffle-groove. I hope this makes sense Rohan! If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask me. Also, I hope that Rick agrees with my assessment of what I believe he specifically meant by tightening-up some of the rhythmic-elements! 😎

Oh and BTW, the only other thing I noticed was that in general. there may have been a few times where your vibrato trailed off a bit instead of finishing a phrase strongly, and at (2:27) and (2:30) there were a couple of phrases where you were applying vibrato to already bent notes (which IMO, is one of the most underrated but yet difficult things to do on guitar!) that I thought could’ve been stronger. However, other than that I thought you did really well!!! 😉

Great job Rohan! 😉

~Bill Meehan~ 😀