So at the beginning of the 2nd half of the solo, there is something very subtle happening that Pat does frequently. I do remember reading an interview with him ages ago where he said that he tries to treat each string like its own instrument or own voice to create an illusion of more orchestration. It’s almost like a piano player plays an idea in his right hand and the left hand responds to it like a question & answer thing:

Even if it’s just a simple slide on the middle strings like in this case, it still gives you the kind of illusion that two separate things are going and everything just opens up for a bit. It’s such a simple idea and mindset that will get you away from just playing scales up and down which we are all guilty of. This is something you could apply to your own playing immediately.

And in the next bar, he does it again. By the way, this is the same example I used for my “Pat’s Technique” videos:

Okay, so let’s get into a few more bars of this. We are at around 3 quarters into the solo and there is a section that would be just impossible to play if you do it the conventional way or how the official score tells you to do it. So in case you ever wanted to master this solo by yourself, please let me chip in my two cents on how I think Pat plays this. If you would follow the notation of the book, your fingers might turn into a pretzel, so let’s do this my way for a second:

So if we apply one of my guidelines where we invert our right hand picking directions, we would start over the D69 chord with an upstroke, downstroke, hammer-on from nowhere, and upstroke again.

And in the next bar, we encounter two consecutive sixteenth notes on one string that are not hammered or pulled or anything, so that means that we apply one of our rules and quickly switch back to alternate picking for a second. So this is regular down-up.

But right after that, you switch everything and start with downstrokes again which will lead you to a small fragment of descending thirds, which means down, hammer-on from nowhere, and then you’re back in A minor pentatonic territory.

Now the next one gets really busy. We have a DbMaj7 chord and he simply starts with the root, 3rd and 5th. And every time he plays a triad like this, Pat usually uses two downstrokes first:

Now the songbook tells you to descend across the lower strings. Don’t forget, I talked about this in my technique videos that Pat rather moves down the neck like this instead of moving down across all strings. I don’t see any chance of him playing it like this, so let’s descend this by using the same string set and throw in some hammer-ons from nowhere.

When you get this far into the solo, you have should have mastered all tricky parts. The rest of the score looks very accurate and you should be able to do this by yourself and finish it. Now as I have mentioned before I would highly recomend to you getting the orginal songbook published by Hal Leonard.

This book will be mandatory if you want to dive deeper into Pat Metheny’s guitar style.

If you are having trouble keeping up with the topics in this blog, or feel that there are not enough pieces of the puzzle to incorporate all of these into your playing, I highly recommend that you check out my selection of jazz guitar online lessons right here:

If you are looking for private jazz guitar lessons with me in the Tokyo area, please take a look at my lesson plans on this page.

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