Hide Away Guitar Lesson

As guitar players it's always inspiring to see who the greats looked up to themselves. In this case it's SRV paying homage to Freddie King with his version of Hide Away. We highly recommend you listen to both versions of the track to get a feel for the different spin SRV puts on it. As always, thank you so much to Jed for breaking this tune down for us. Let's check out the video:

Set up

Before launching into the notes, it's really important to cover the guitar tuning, and SRV's infamous choice of string gauge! The most important point is that we're tuned down half a step to Eb Standard, meaning our strings from low to high are Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb. If you're used to playing with lighter strings, 9s for example, you'll probably find this makes them too rattly and buzzy, which is why we recommend going for heavier strings. SRV famously used 13s for much of his playing, but this can make bends extremely tough, even with the dropped tuning, so bear that in mind. You may prefer to find a middle ground like Jed and go for something like 11s.

Once you're tuned down to Eb Standard you'll be ready to go! We're in the key of Gb blues for this song, but it will look like we're in G due to the dropped tuning. Be prepared for the guitar to feel different with lower tuning, and you never know, you might just fall in love with it!

We're in the key of E blues and we're sticking to the first five frets on the neck. This means we're going to be basing a lot of the riff in the open position, using a mix between E Major Pentatonic shape 2 and Minor Pentatonic shape 1. Since these shapes also include the open strings they can feel less familiar, so be aware of which open strings are actually in the shapes! Here they are for your reference:

We start off with an E major pentatonic run up which then goes straight into a Texas Blues style shuffle on the E chord - aka **the I chord**. This shuffle pattern is really important to get familiar with as it appears so much in blues and rock from artists across the musical spectrum! We are simply holding an E5 chord and then bringing in and out the major 6 in place of the 5th like this:

But simply knowing the notes isn't enough. It's the Texas Shuffle *feel* that's so important here too. If you're unfamiliar with this we'll cover it brielfy here. In it's most basic terms a shuffle is moving the 'and' slighly later than exactly halfway between the beats. This is different to a 'straight' tune where the 'and' is exactly in the middle. This is better demonstrated with a diagram comparing the two:

We want to achieve the sound in a natural feelling way, which you can do by 'strumming in a circle' so that your pick takes longer to reach the strings for the upstroke, or you can just try to feel the rhythm. The musical effect of this is to give a more laid back sound and feel to a tune. As an experiment try playing the riff both as a shuffle and then completely straight. See if you can hear the difference!

After that we're into some chromatic slides, still in the same position on the neck, followed by a nice minor to major hammer on on the G string - check out the fretboard diagram above to see the position.

Then we finish on the shuffle riff with a nice run up into the IV chord, the A. This run up is often the kind of thing you'll hear played on bass, but here we're playing it on guitar. Here are the notes you need for this run:

Hopefully you can hear that run up leading us to the IV chord, and it should sound just right when you get to that A chord! We're then back on that shuffle rhythm again, this time on the A, and we're adding in an extra note, the b7, to give a bit of variation to the riff. That looks like this on the fretboard:

This is followed by the minor to major phrase to lead us back into the E5 shuffle pattern before going up to the V chord, but instead of playing the chord, which would be B, we have a really nice lead break all in the open position on the neck to take us all the way through the turnaround. Jed takes us through this note by note in the video and here is the basic scale shape outline for you to refer to while you're watching:

From there we're back into a second lead break over the next 12 bar progression. This time there's more improvisation, but we also revisit some of the main themes from the intro. Once again Jed takes you through every part of this so be sure to check the video for the full details, and keep in mind that we're still in E minor pentatonic open position as before.

And there we have it! Huge thanks to Jed for breaking this one down for us. There's a lot to take in here, so as always remember to take your time with it, and have fun!