Unless you’re as old as me or a particular fan of the 60s ‘supergroup’ Cream, you won’t have come across this track. It’s not a big blues jam like so much of Cream. This is a really innovative studio track that draws upon Jack Bruce’s skills as a cellist and acoustic guitarist as well as his fantastic singing. It’s also a fascinating experiment with dissonance – something you won’t often find outside modern jazz and atonal classical music. Have a listen …
If I had to guess, I’d say the inspiration for this track came from an unusual acoustic guitar tuning – an open Dsus4. The notes of a Dsus4 chord are D G (the suspended fourth) and A. The tuning, from bottom up, goes D A D G A D.
Open tunings, like this, have a number of advantages. Firstly, they provide the possibility for a drone-like backing, in this case helped by the three open Ds and the two As. You can then apply relatively simple shapes over the top to achieve some lovely dissonances, totally unlike conventional guitar chords and often un-namable (check out this chord site as an example – they’ve had a go at naming the chords, but in many cases, these are only approximations).
Another advantage of the open tuning is that, by experimenting with shapes, you can arrive at some really unusual melody lines – and they don’t get much more unusual (at least for a blues band) than As You Said.
Finally, it’s really refreshing that you can’t easily reproduce open tunings on a keyboard. This technique is just for the guitarist – a real one, not a virtual guitar instrument.
