The Part You Don't Play

Most guitarists arrive at soul music from rock or blues and play far too much. That is the single biggest obstacle, and it is worth dealing with before any technique.

In a soul band the guitar is not the main voice and it is not the harmonic foundation either. The bass has the bottom, the keys or horns fill the middle, the drums own the groove, and there is a singer whose words are the entire point of the record. The guitar sits in the gaps between all of that. Steve Cropper, who played on a huge number of the records that define the genre, is famous for parts that are two or three notes long and mostly silence — and those records would sound wrong without them.

So the first skill is subtraction. A good soul part is usually one short figure, played in the same place in the bar, repeated with small variations, leaving most of the bar empty.

There are three questions worth asking before you play anything over a soul track.

Where is the singer? The busiest thing you play should happen where the voice is not. If you do not have a vocal to work around, imagine one, and leave the first half of each phrase alone.

Where is the snare? Soul lives on beats two and four. Locking something to the backbeat, or deliberately just after it, is more effective than filling every beat.

What register is free? If the bass is low and the keys are in the middle, you want the top strings. Almost all the voicings in this path live on the top three or four strings for exactly this reason.

Play this once through without touching the guitar. Find the backbeat, notice how much space there is, and decide where a guitar part would fit before you play a note.

Then play it again and give yourself one rule: you may only play on beats two and four. Nothing else. It will feel absurdly sparse for about thirty seconds and then it will start to feel like a record.

That constraint is the whole lesson. Everything that follows is vocabulary to use inside it.