Chords for Steep Canyon Rangers - "Meet The Steeps - Nicky Sanders"
Tempo:
63.6 bpm
Chords used:
G
D
C
Em
E
Tuning:Standard Tuning (EADGBE)Capo:+0fret
Start Jamming...
[G]
Nicky was really kind of a surprise.
We lost our fiddle player in [Em] 2002, I believe, or [G] 2003.
So we shuffled fiddle players for at least two years.
And then Nicky emailed me through talking with a mutual friend.
He was like, hey, this guy's in Boston at Berklee School of Music, and he [Em] really would
be interested in coming and auditioning.
[G] We pretty much [D] hired him on the spot.
He's been a huge part of the Steep Canyon Rangers sound.
He kind of wows the audience every night.
It's good to have somebody in the band that does that.
I grew up in San Francisco, California.
That's where I went to high school, and that's where I played in youth orchestras, string
chamber quartets, until I was 18.
That's when I became the wild child and went to Berklee College of Music to study jazz
and try to emulate Stefan Grappelli and players like that.
I ended up not ever pursuing jazz, but in a way, bluegrass is American mountain jazz.
There's improvisation.
We have a head, a middle, and a tail to each song, and there's virtuosity involved.
I love the bluegrass quintet as a chamber group, if you can think of it as a chamber
group, because there's still a talking [C] relationship between the voices.
[G] We write a lot of that into our music.
The mandolin and the fiddle will talk, or the banjo and the fiddle will trade.
[D] Or maybe the guitar and the mandolin play a [G] duet like they do at the beginning of Cumberland
Moon, if you've seen our show live.
That's just a duet, and then it turns into a quintet when the band comes in.
All these types of orchestrations are the same things that I studied in school, in classical
music and in composition.
I studied composition as one of my majors at [C] Berklee.
This is just [G] a new genre with the same old techniques of [D] composition and arrangement.
So I guess one thing I'm really excited [G] about is I'm [C] performing bluegrass songs and bluegrass
[G] licks on a fiddle that is tuned to an old-time tuning system.
[Abm] This tuning really works out well [G]
for
And you can hear that kind of Dirk Powell-like music coming [Bb] from this tuning.
I took it upon myself to learn some new [Ab] fingerings to suit a couple bluegrass songs to this tuning.
And [G] one of those is As I Go.
So I guess it's different because rather than [E] playing kind of simple melodies and pentatonic
scales and trying to incorporate all those slides
[Gb]
[Eb] [G] When I was much younger, [D] my teenage days, [G] I had a high school rock band, [C] a garage band.
[G] And now that I'm a bluegrass fiddle player, I listen to a lot of fiddle music, or I hear
a lot of fiddle music, and one of my favorite records that comes to mind is Drive by Bela Fleck.
There's a song called Down in the Swamp that I've been working on the electric guitar version,
and I guess you could [A] say
[Bm] [Em]
[D]
[Dm] [Eb] So as in [Am] that first example when I was playing a fiddle tune on the electric guitar, when
I'm not doing that, [Dm] I might be playing an electric guitar melody on the fiddle.
[Gm] This is my plugged-in setup here on [B] an instrument built by Robert Kogut out [F] of Lenore, North Carolina.
[G] And using a Jimi [E] Hendrix wah pedal here and a little Fender tube amp.
[D] I like to have fun and [G] go electric every now and then.
This amp doesn't go to 11, by the way, it only goes to about 3.
[G]
Nicky was really kind of a surprise.
We lost our fiddle player in [Em] 2002, I believe, or [G] 2003.
So we shuffled fiddle players for at least two years.
And then Nicky emailed me through talking with a mutual friend.
He was like, hey, this guy's in Boston at Berklee School of Music, and he [Em] really would
be interested in coming and auditioning.
[G] We pretty much [D] hired him on the spot.
He's been a huge part of the Steep Canyon Rangers sound.
He kind of wows the audience every night.
It's good to have somebody in the band that does that.
I grew up in San Francisco, California.
That's where I went to high school, and that's where I played in youth orchestras, string
chamber quartets, until I was 18.
That's when I became the wild child and went to Berklee College of Music to study jazz
and try to emulate Stefan Grappelli and players like that.
I ended up not ever pursuing jazz, but in a way, bluegrass is American mountain jazz.
There's improvisation.
We have a head, a middle, and a tail to each song, and there's virtuosity involved.
I love the bluegrass quintet as a chamber group, if you can think of it as a chamber
group, because there's still a talking [C] relationship between the voices.
[G] We write a lot of that into our music.
The mandolin and the fiddle will talk, or the banjo and the fiddle will trade.
[D] Or maybe the guitar and the mandolin play a [G] duet like they do at the beginning of Cumberland
Moon, if you've seen our show live.
That's just a duet, and then it turns into a quintet when the band comes in.
All these types of orchestrations are the same things that I studied in school, in classical
music and in composition.
I studied composition as one of my majors at [C] Berklee.
This is just [G] a new genre with the same old techniques of [D] composition and arrangement.
So I guess one thing I'm really excited [G] about is I'm [C] performing bluegrass songs and bluegrass
[G] licks on a fiddle that is tuned to an old-time tuning system.
[Abm] This tuning really works out well [G]
for
And you can hear that kind of Dirk Powell-like music coming [Bb] from this tuning.
I took it upon myself to learn some new [Ab] fingerings to suit a couple bluegrass songs to this tuning.
And [G] one of those is As I Go.
So I guess it's different because rather than [E] playing kind of simple melodies and pentatonic
scales and trying to incorporate all those slides
[Gb]
[Eb] [G] When I was much younger, [D] my teenage days, [G] I had a high school rock band, [C] a garage band.
[G] And now that I'm a bluegrass fiddle player, I listen to a lot of fiddle music, or I hear
a lot of fiddle music, and one of my favorite records that comes to mind is Drive by Bela Fleck.
There's a song called Down in the Swamp that I've been working on the electric guitar version,
and I guess you could [A] say
[Bm] [Em]
[D]
[Dm] [Eb] So as in [Am] that first example when I was playing a fiddle tune on the electric guitar, when
I'm not doing that, [Dm] I might be playing an electric guitar melody on the fiddle.
[Gm] This is my plugged-in setup here on [B] an instrument built by Robert Kogut out [F] of Lenore, North Carolina.
[G] And using a Jimi [E] Hendrix wah pedal here and a little Fender tube amp.
[D] I like to have fun and [G] go electric every now and then.
This amp doesn't go to 11, by the way, it only goes to about 3.
[G]
Key:
G
D
C
Em
E
G
D
C
_ _ [G] _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ Nicky was really kind of a surprise.
We lost our fiddle player in [Em] 2002, I believe, or [G] 2003.
So we shuffled fiddle players for at least two years.
And then Nicky emailed me through talking with a mutual friend.
He was like, hey, this guy's in Boston at Berklee School of Music, and he [Em] really would
be interested in coming and auditioning.
[G] We pretty much [D] hired him on the spot.
He's been a huge part of the Steep Canyon Rangers sound.
He kind of wows the audience every night.
It's good to have somebody in the band that does that.
I grew up in San Francisco, California.
That's where I went to high school, and that's where I played in youth orchestras, string
chamber quartets, until I was 18.
That's when I became the wild child and went to Berklee College of Music to study jazz
and try to emulate Stefan Grappelli and players like that.
I ended up not ever pursuing jazz, but in a way, bluegrass is American mountain jazz.
There's improvisation.
We have a head, a middle, and a tail to each song, and there's virtuosity involved.
I love the bluegrass quintet as a chamber group, if you can think of it as a chamber
group, because there's still a talking [C] relationship between the voices.
[G] We write a lot of that into our music.
The mandolin and the fiddle will talk, or the banjo and the fiddle will trade.
[D] Or maybe the guitar and the mandolin play a [G] duet like they do at the beginning of Cumberland
Moon, if you've seen our show live.
That's just a duet, and then it turns into a quintet when the band comes in.
All these types of orchestrations are the same things that I studied in school, in classical
music and in composition.
I studied composition as one of my majors at [C] Berklee.
This is just [G] a new genre with the same old techniques of [D] composition and arrangement.
So I guess one thing I'm really excited [G] about is I'm [C] performing bluegrass songs and bluegrass
[G] licks on a fiddle that is tuned to an old-time tuning system.
[Abm] This tuning really works out well [G]
for_
And you can hear that kind of Dirk Powell-like music coming [Bb] from this tuning.
I took it upon myself to learn some new [Ab] fingerings to suit a couple bluegrass songs to this tuning.
And [G] one of those is As I Go.
_ _ _ _ _ _ So I guess it's different because rather than [E] playing kind of simple melodies and pentatonic
scales and trying to incorporate all those slides_
_ _ _ _ [Gb] _ _
[Eb] _ _ [G] When I was much younger, [D] my teenage days, [G] I had a high school rock band, [C] a garage band.
[G] And now that I'm a bluegrass fiddle player, I listen to a lot of fiddle music, or I hear
a lot of fiddle music, and one of my favorite records that comes to mind is Drive by Bela Fleck.
There's a song called Down in the Swamp that I've been working on the electric guitar version,
and I guess you could [A] say_
_ _ [Bm] _ _ _ _ _ [Em] _
_ _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ _
[Dm] _ [Eb] So as in [Am] that first example when I was playing a fiddle tune on the electric guitar, when
I'm not doing that, [Dm] I might be playing an electric guitar melody on the fiddle.
[Gm] This is my plugged-in setup here on [B] an instrument built by Robert Kogut out [F] of Lenore, North Carolina.
[G] And using a Jimi [E] Hendrix wah pedal here and a little Fender tube amp.
[D] I like to have fun and [G] go electric every now and then.
This amp doesn't go to 11, by the way, it only goes to about 3.
_ _ [G] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ Nicky was really kind of a surprise.
We lost our fiddle player in [Em] 2002, I believe, or [G] 2003.
So we shuffled fiddle players for at least two years.
And then Nicky emailed me through talking with a mutual friend.
He was like, hey, this guy's in Boston at Berklee School of Music, and he [Em] really would
be interested in coming and auditioning.
[G] We pretty much [D] hired him on the spot.
He's been a huge part of the Steep Canyon Rangers sound.
He kind of wows the audience every night.
It's good to have somebody in the band that does that.
I grew up in San Francisco, California.
That's where I went to high school, and that's where I played in youth orchestras, string
chamber quartets, until I was 18.
That's when I became the wild child and went to Berklee College of Music to study jazz
and try to emulate Stefan Grappelli and players like that.
I ended up not ever pursuing jazz, but in a way, bluegrass is American mountain jazz.
There's improvisation.
We have a head, a middle, and a tail to each song, and there's virtuosity involved.
I love the bluegrass quintet as a chamber group, if you can think of it as a chamber
group, because there's still a talking [C] relationship between the voices.
[G] We write a lot of that into our music.
The mandolin and the fiddle will talk, or the banjo and the fiddle will trade.
[D] Or maybe the guitar and the mandolin play a [G] duet like they do at the beginning of Cumberland
Moon, if you've seen our show live.
That's just a duet, and then it turns into a quintet when the band comes in.
All these types of orchestrations are the same things that I studied in school, in classical
music and in composition.
I studied composition as one of my majors at [C] Berklee.
This is just [G] a new genre with the same old techniques of [D] composition and arrangement.
So I guess one thing I'm really excited [G] about is I'm [C] performing bluegrass songs and bluegrass
[G] licks on a fiddle that is tuned to an old-time tuning system.
[Abm] This tuning really works out well [G]
for_
And you can hear that kind of Dirk Powell-like music coming [Bb] from this tuning.
I took it upon myself to learn some new [Ab] fingerings to suit a couple bluegrass songs to this tuning.
And [G] one of those is As I Go.
_ _ _ _ _ _ So I guess it's different because rather than [E] playing kind of simple melodies and pentatonic
scales and trying to incorporate all those slides_
_ _ _ _ [Gb] _ _
[Eb] _ _ [G] When I was much younger, [D] my teenage days, [G] I had a high school rock band, [C] a garage band.
[G] And now that I'm a bluegrass fiddle player, I listen to a lot of fiddle music, or I hear
a lot of fiddle music, and one of my favorite records that comes to mind is Drive by Bela Fleck.
There's a song called Down in the Swamp that I've been working on the electric guitar version,
and I guess you could [A] say_
_ _ [Bm] _ _ _ _ _ [Em] _
_ _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ _
[Dm] _ [Eb] So as in [Am] that first example when I was playing a fiddle tune on the electric guitar, when
I'm not doing that, [Dm] I might be playing an electric guitar melody on the fiddle.
[Gm] This is my plugged-in setup here on [B] an instrument built by Robert Kogut out [F] of Lenore, North Carolina.
[G] And using a Jimi [E] Hendrix wah pedal here and a little Fender tube amp.
[D] I like to have fun and [G] go electric every now and then.
This amp doesn't go to 11, by the way, it only goes to about 3.
_ _ [G] _ _ _ _