rock & roll
l Legendary duo: the Everly Brothers playing their trusty Gibson acoustics
The Everly Brothers
Two of the most influential figures in music not only changed the vocal approach in popular songs, but arguably invented the heavy rock guitar riff too!
If you take Don’s chords and electrify them, with a lyric on top, you have the essence of heavy rock Phil Everly
Bye Love, Wake Up Little Suzie and others; a simple but powerful minor pentatonic chord riff with very similar intervals to Smoke On The Water. “I tried it on my open G acoustic one afternoon and it just happened,” recalled Don. Brother Phil goes as far as asserting that big brother Donald actually invented heavy rock by way of the standalone intro chord riff – a sequence sometimes but not always related to the song that follows it, such as Led Zeppelin’s Communication Breakdown, Sunshine Of Your Love by Cream and the aforementioned Deep Purple classic. Phil: “When you take Donald’s intro to Bye Bye Love, Wake Up Little Suzie, Bird Dog or any of the others, that was the first time that those kind of incongruous chords were used. If you take those chords and electrify them with a lyric on top, you have the essence of heavy rock, which is essentially a song written around a riff.” The great guitarist Chet Atkins, a friend of the boys’ father and a great champion of the duo, would manage many of The Everlys’ studio sessions and invariably end up playing electric guitar on the tracks. This could be in the form of a riff, broken chords or arpeggios - very commonly using tremolo effect - and even the occasional baritone guitar to beef things up in the low end. This example imagines a typical Everlys’ session guitar line-up of Don’s acoustic rhythm, a tremolo guitar playing
TRACK RECORD It’s Greatest Hits time again. There are numerous on the market but The Golden Years Of The Everly Brothers contains Wake Up Little Suzie, Bird Dog and Bye Bye Love (all of which use Don’s open G chord riffing) and of course Cathy’s Clown, Crying In The Rain, Temptation, The Price Of Love, Walk Right Back and all those other killer tracks. 24
Get the tone Don used regular sized Gibson acoustics in the studio, not the bigger Everly Brothers jumbos the brothers took on stage. Go for a mellow tone and back off the top end if you’re using a piezo. For the riffs and chords a Tele, or a semi with humbuckers or singlecoils is ideal, but any bridge pickup will do. When using Tremolo, it always sounds best with a little delay. Don’t worry about timing the speed to the track, just make sure that the depth and speed are sympathetic.
CBS/GETTY IMAGES
Think of The Everly Brothers and you inevitably imagine beautiful sibling vocal harmonies, weepy ballads about plane crashes, teenage crushes gone wrong and a host of other sad-ending songs. But would it surprise you to find that guitar riffs as powerful as Smoke On The Water, Communication Breakdown and Sunshine Of Your Love can be traced directly back to Don Everly’s innovative acoustic guitar playing on the duo’s 1957 debut hit Bye Bye Love? According to Don, the older of the Everlys, he’d heard Bo Diddley’s famous ‘dum-ti-dum-dum, ti-dum-dum’ rhythm and it affected him so much that he wanted to come up with something equally catchy but which didn’t rip the great bluesman off. Don had already got into open G tuning via his father, country singer Ike Everly, and an aunt Hattie who also played songs in this way. So the tuning and the rhythm conspired to create the sound you hear at the start of Bye