The guitar and its playing techniques in the 21st century Essay

Submitted By MCHammertime94
Words: 351
Pages: 2

How does the piece ‘Ocean’ by John Butler use guitar techniques to appeal popular to the 21st century audience?

The piece ‘Ocean’ by John Butler appeals popular to the 21st century audience through his variety of guitar techniques. Butler uses an 12 stringed semi-acoustic guitar with open C tuning and Capo on the 4th fret giving an open chord of E Major. The song is through composed and consists of several sections that demonstrate guitar techniques and musical concepts.

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The introduction has a piano volume level with sustained power chords (A5, B5, G#5, E5) layered behind the C# melody.

Butler uses the guitar techniques of hammer ons, pull offs, finger picking, slides and tapping. These techniques are continually used throughout the song but are more prominent in the introduction however, tapping is only used in this section. They create the feeling and tone colour for the song which is happy, joyful, light and mellow.

The pitch of this section is a higher melody with lower chordal accompaniment. The repetition of the notes G#, E, D#, F# and B reinforce the tone colour of the song and are repeated throughout the introduction giving the audience a taste of the song to come however, these notes are also repeated in similar patterns through certain sections in the song which gives the audience a sense of melody or relation even though there is not set melody or riff.

This section has a homophonic texture which is successfully being achieved on the