The year 2015 was a monumental one for music. It was the moment Will Ferrell strapped on a Fender Strat and took blues-rock breaks wrapped in a blanket of soft balladeering to the next level in the movie Get Hard. And now you can play it too. (I’m assuming John Mayer played the guitar breaks and solo in Daughters as he’s the only one listed in the movie’s end credits.)
The song Daughters is in B minor and the lead guitar breaks stick closely to the classic B minor pentatonic scale. I’ve seen it transcribed in 6/8 but I’ve put it in 3/4 below. The classic pentatonic box shape is shown starting from the seventh fret and shape two starting from the 12th fret. All five guitar fills resolve to D, the relative major of B minor.
The first guitar break begins immediately with a series of double-stops that ends with the G-F#-D motif (adding the sixth to the pentatonic scale) – this motif appears again later.
The second guitar break is a simple guitar bend. It follows the line “Fathers be good to your daughters…”.
The third guitar break follows the classic B minor pentatonic scale and ends with the same motif that opened the song. “Daughters will love like you do…”.
The fourth guitar fill is a simple double stop that follows the line “Girls become lovers…”.
The fifth break bridges the first and second penatonic shape and again resolved to D. It answers the line: “Who turn into mothers…”
The final solo that begins with Will Ferrell saying, “John lay back, im’ma gonna take a few bars…” ends the song. The transcribed timing below is not perfectly accurate – slow down the actual solo using YouTube’s playback speed function and use your ears to get it right. Make sure that the bends are clean in bar six and there’s plenty of attack on the notes in the first four bars.
The great thing about the blues is it doesn’t require complexity to convey emotion. Here’s a contrast in styles with John Mayer on the more dazzling side and B.B. King on the simpler, but just as effective, side. Mayer uses Ernie Ball Regular Slinky and Power Slinky strings on his electric and Earthwood Phosphor Bronze Medium Light acoustic strings.
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