Overview

My observations on this piece and comments about how passages should be played are merely my own interpretation, and are intended to be non-binding. If there's any information here you find useful, great! Otherwise, I hope you study this piece and learn to play it well, your own way. It will give you countless hours of enjoyment.

Metronome
The tempo of the piece is 188 bpm, so I mostly use 94 bpm, and 188 only occassionally to check the even-ness of a lick or run. At 94 you can easily practice at both half and full-speed. 188 is too clicky, like using a typewriter as a hi-hat. Unless your brain is made of quartz crystals, you will need a metronome to study this piece, even though it's in 4/4, Common Time. Start using it religiously from the very beginning, before you get too many bad habits absorbed into your muscle-memory.

General things to notice about this tune
Note the key changes. The intro and rhythm figure are in the key of D-Major, and in measure 9 another sharp is added which switches the tune to the key of A-Major. The rest of the piece alternates back-and-forth between these two keys. This is all bullshit. Skip down a few sections to hear the final word on the topic...

An important update:
After hearing the composer, John Jorgenson, discuss this piece on the TrueFire/Notes-On-Call audio lesson, I'm confused. He says that the piece is in three keys, beginning with A, then E, then moving to Bm. Whether this is just a mistake, or if I'm not hearing him correctly in the audio lesson, I don't know. The key signature at the beginning of the Dave Whitehill transcription is two sharps. When I took piano lessons as a young lad Mrs. Foster taught me that the note 1/2-step up from the last sharp determined the key of the piece. While John and I agree that there is an A-Major section, that is, three sharps, I'm not sure that we agree on which section this is. I say it's the second section, but I believe that John implies that it is the first. Then he notes the change to B-minor, the relative minor of D-Major, and I have no problem agreeing with the composer in this case, especially since a few of the runs which kind of define the tonal center for me, sound more like Bm pentatonic rather than DM pentatonic, even though they're the really the same position. But until somebody can 'splain me otherwise, I'm sticking with what I was taught by Mrs. Foster, and maintain that to my understanding the piece moves from DM to AM to Bm. Am I wrong? Then will someone kindly explain this to me, please?


After further study...
Intuition and experience playing this piece tells me that John is correct about the key changes. So for now, until I can edit all the places in these pages where I make assertions about the key signature, let's just accept the composer's description as the gospel on the topic; A to E to Bm.

After even further study...
If you consult the Circle Of Fifths, you will see that the G-Major chord isn't in the key of A-Major, but is in the key of D-Major, as are both A-Major and D-Major. I'm going back to my original assertion that the piece alternates between D and A, with a Bm section. As for part of this piece being in the key of E? I don't see that anywhere...

And here's the final word on the topic...
The song is in A. The main riff is in A, as the composer has clearly stated. It feels like it's in A when you play it, because you're playing it out of an A position. The book says it's in D, but that could be for any number of reasons, including just a plain-old error. I'll fix the places where I dogmatically assert otherwise.

Tension and Release
The phrases and motifs in this song create a continous stream of tension-and-release, varying sections which provide rhythmic tension and harmonic tension, and sometimes both. Example of both can be found in measure 16 when the second motif of the head resolves to Rhy. Fig. 1.

Harmony
This concept is central to nearly all of The Hellecasters' work. A guitar in standard tuning has a fairly limited musical register. If you include the bass guitar, you could make an analogy of a string quartet composed of three violins and a bass. In this situation it becomes tricky to keep the music sounding like three distinct voices, but these Hellecaster people manage to pull it off beautifully. Sometimes with high-and-tight bluegrassy harmonies and sometimes with very open, wide and weaving harmonies like J.S. Bach might use, and everything you can imagine in between. One thing is fairly certain; if you study their pieces you're likely to learn a lot about harmonizing with other guitarists.