ugh
October 12, 2017, 1:26pm
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I don’t have the time right now to watch all nine minutes of the video, so I don’t know if this is mentioned, but it’s an essential part of Nick Drake’s sound that isn’t included in the list of four most significant factors in the post: cluster chords .
His unconventional tunings that allowed him to play cluster chords is a big part of his sound, so I’m disappointed to see it excluded from that list.
Nick Drake did it, too. He created a unique sound by combining Beatles-style chord progressions with the guitar innovations of the British folk music scene of the 1960’s (pedal points – where the bass plays the same note under shifting chords – drones, and de-tunings). But he immediately leaped far ahead of his contemporaries in his use of “cluster chords” – these are chords that have more than the standard 3 notes of a major or minor chord and whose notes tend to be clustered very close together (creating minor or major seconds).
Although cluster chords are easy to play on keyboards, they’re a pain in the neck (literally) to play on guitar. Since most rock and pop songs were written on guitar in the ’50s and ’60s, you rarely heard them. Nick got around the problem of playing them by de-tuning his guitar – an idea he probably got from Bert Jansch (as did Jimmy Page), but his tunings were highly unusual, to say the least. And I do not know of a single guitar player in that time period (including Jansch) who was using cluster chords as extensively or fluidly as Nick was. Even when playing a simple major or minor chord on guitar, he was often singing the extension. It is one of the things that gives his work its contemporary and extremely identifiable sound.
(source )
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