Sunshine Of Your Love

With a mix of rock and blues elements, Sunshine Of Your Love is definitely one of these classics that we should all have in our arsenal, so let’s jump into it!

Intro riff

The intro riff of Sunshine Of Your Love is mainly played over shape 1 of the D minor pentatonic scale, with a touch of shape 5. As always, try to visualise the whole shape, even if we’re not playing all the notes!

In terms of picking, you have a few options, but I decided to only play downstrokes on all of the notes. What’s important is to play what feels comfortable. If you want to play downs and ups, that’s perfectly fine!

Something to be careful with is that the notes we’re playing should be quite “dry”, or staccato. Press down on the strings when you want to hear the note, and don’t hold on to the note for too long or you’ll add too much sustain. When playing fret 8 on the A string, you could add some vibrato, or a quarter tone bend. Play around with it and see what feels right!

As this intro riff is going to be the foundation for understanding and playing the rest of the song, I’d suggest you spend some time on it before moving on to the rest of the song. The more solid and confident you feel with this intro, the easier the rest will be!

Verse - first part

The verse is very much built around the same motif as the intro riff that we’ve just seen, but we’re going to swap the first four notes we played with two chords: D7 and C7

The chords are played with the same E shape, we just move it up or down to fret 10 or 8, so try to make sure you’re transposing the whole shape, and not rebuilding it from scratch.

The timing of these two chords is exactly the same as the first four notes of the intro riff as well! And just like in the intro riff, try to keep these two chords “dry”.

The melody that follows is very similar to what we’ve seen before, we’re still on shape 1 of the D minor pentatonic scale, but we have some double stops on frets 12 and 10 on the G and B strings. You can also add a quarter tone bend again on fret 10!

Verse - second part

The second part of the verse is structured around the same motif again, but we’re moving up a fourth. Moving up a fourth is something you’d do a lot when playing guitar. It’s a big part of the blues sound! The good news is that since guitars are (mainly) tuned in fourths, that means we just have to transpose what we’ve seen so far up a string!

The first two chords we play are now G7 and F7, but as mentioned, you could play G5 and F5, or even G major and F major.

Let’s talk about the rest of the riff in this second part. Essentially, we are playing the same thing we’ve seen in the intro riff, with the same rhythm, but up a string! In theory, that means you’ve now changed both key and shape. Just so you know, we are now playing over the shape 4 of the G minor pentatonic scale.

If this is too much theory, don’t worry too much about it. To be completely honest with you, I had no idea I was doing that when I first learned that riff around 20 years ago!

Chorus

In the chorus, we’re going to need three new chords: A major, C major and G major.

Let’s look at the shapes I’d use:

If this is too many barre chords for you, you can of course play these three chords with open shapes. It doesn’t sound quite like the song, but it isn’t wrong either.

The structure of the chorus is pretty straightforward. We play A for four beats before moving on to C and G for two beats each, and we repeat that three times. After that, we have two bars of A major, before jumping back onto the riff!

Strumming wise, we’ll need to feel 16th notes, which means your strumming hand will move down on the beats and the “ands” as we count them. On the first two bars (which we repeat three times) the pattern will look like this:

On the last two bars, we’re only playing A major, but the strumming pattern becomes a little richer:

In conclusion

This is the kind of song that mixes everything. We have melodies, chords and rhythm to learn! So something important here is to take it step by step. Feel free to spend some time on the intro riff to make sure it’s solid before moving on to the rest of it!

Also, as always, make sure you can sing or “hum” the rhythmic parts we’ve been learning, as it’s always easier to understand rhythm when we can sing it!

Guitar solo

This is an absolute classic guitar solo which some nice melodic phrases, tight bends, and loads of feel. We'll break it down section by section. The best way to learn this is to take each section as an individual part, and learn the underlying shapes being used. If you learn it this way you will have a much better understanding of the solo, and therefore be much more likely to remember it long term than if you just learnt it by numbers with a tab. The whole solo is played over over the verse and chorus sections, replacing the vocal. So make sure you know those parts first, then dive in with this video!

Phrase 1

This first phrase is all based in D minor pentatonic box 1, and just going into box 2. Interestingly, Clapton is calling back to the song 'Blue Moon' with the melody here! Make sure you're really hitting those bends accurately. Here's the shape for you:

Phrase 2

Here we jump down to D major pentatonic to give a really nice response to that first phrase. It's also a really blues technique to play a mixture of minor and major pentatonic. Make sure you're hitting that double stop!

Phrase 3

For this phrase we're still in D major pentatonic box 1, this time climbing up the scale with hammer ons and landing onto that same double stop.

Phrase 4

This phrase is a tricky one to get right. We're somewhere between D major and D minor pentatonic using some big bends on D minor pentatonic box 5 before going back to D major pentatonic box 1. They're in the same area on the fretboard and the huge bend nicely helps us transition between them. Here's D minor pentatonic box 5

Phrase 5

For this phrase we're back to D major pentatonic box 1, with a very subtle shift to D minor pentatonic using just a bend on the 10th fret of G string. Watch out for that!

Phrase 6

From here we shift to a double stop based idea, and go all the way up to D minor pentatonic box 2 then down into box 1. From there we do a classic D minor box 1 but with the minor to major 3rd hammer on on the G string. Here are the shapes you need:

Phrase 7 - end

This is the home stretch of the solo, played over the same chords as the 'I've been waiting so long' chorus section, A C and G. These are all melodic phrases based around D minor pentatonic boxes 1 and 2. We've combined them here but highly recommend still tackling each phase individually to begin with.