Overdub Challenge - Friends in Low Places

In recent times I’ve been honing my steel guitar chops by studying a range of lessons provided through the excellent Travis Toy Tutorials. Travis is a wonderful player and an insightful teacher. Whether a beginner or advanced player, you would be hard pressed to find a better resource for learning approaches to playing using the E9 tuning.

One of the fun things that Travis organises for subscribers to his course is the occasional ‘overdub challenge’. The task is to record a solo to a well known song. The best part is that the winners are judged by Travis’s wife Jennifer Toy. It’s fair to say that Jennifer is not familiar with the ins, outs and technical details of steel guitar playing. But she does know what sounds good and has so far picked very well executed, worthy contributions for her winners’ list. At the time of writing I haven’t yet scored a spot on the podium, but I take comfort in the fact that in the last challenge, Travis snuck in a solo that he recorded (twice) without telling Jennifer, and he also didn’t make the cut!

The first solo challenge was to overdub a solo for Garth Brooks’ huge hit “Friends in Low Places”.

The very tasty steel solo, recorded by Bruce Bouton kicks in at around 1.25. Although- like everyone- I was aware of Garth Brooks in the 1990s, my musical tastes at the time were more aligned with Seattle than Nashville. So while I knew this song, I didn’t know it well enough to have a clear idea in my mind of what the original solo sounded like. This was helpful for the challenge as I didn’t have any pre-conceived ideas to work with (or against).

As the guitar part that leads into the steel solo stays close to the vocal melody, I went with something that departed from the melody without being too adventurous. I think I put a hint of a diminished chord in there to move away a bit from a straight kind of voicing. Anyway- here is what I came up with.