This is the fourth instalment on the live version of Josh Smith's tune “Triple J Hoedown,” featured on his album, Live at the Spud, recorded at the infamous Baked Potato in Los Angeles. We looked at the section that precedes his guitar solo and features drummer Gary Novak and Josh freely improvising on the groove with no strict adherence to any chord progression. Here, Josh talks about what he plays in the tune’s solo section.
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00:00Hey, Josh Smith here again. We're in our fourth lesson on Triple J Hoedown, my tune from Live
00:10at the Spud. We're up to the solo, where I've built the solo up from the open section into
00:14this 12-bar blues with a 2-5-1 turnaround, and I throw it all at this solo. So I'm going to play
00:20through an entire chorus, and we'll talk about what's going on. So it's basically a blues. I'm
00:25going to play a full 12 bars. One, two, three.
00:31Anyways, we played two of those in the song, and of course I'm just making that all up as I go along,
00:57but I played a bunch of stuff in there, and it would be different every night because it's an
01:02improvisation. But basically, I started off with open G stuff. So it went from kind of open stuff
01:13to a regular blues chromatically, with a little open string droning happening there. When we got
01:23to the four, I played a cool old blues, country blues thing in C, which is really cool.
01:38And I like to play that a lot, especially when C is not the one chord. When you play a lick like that
01:42over the four, man, it's just it's like this tension is so real that when you resolve
01:52it's a big moment, you know? So
01:57then we got to the 2-5-1, and I played an arpeggio
02:03from A minor
02:04to D7, and then back to G. And I played a full chorus of blues like that. Then I do another one.
02:20I ended it, of course, with the blues turnaround.
02:25Just because I like to have something standard at the end for the non-musicians in the audience that
02:29they can grab onto. Because by then, we're getting a little carried away with ourselves.
02:34After that, we're back into the last theme of the song, which is back to the...
02:44We play all three themes.
02:48And we finally end back up at the intro.
02:50And we rephrase the big lick.
03:09We all end with that big downbeat.
03:12And that's Triple J Hoedown.
03:14There's a lot going on in that song. I wrote it a long time ago,
03:18and I'm just glad people like it.