Green Day - Brain Stew

Brains Stew by Green Day, this is from their 1995 album Insomniac. This is an E-flat tuning, so you'll need to get your tuner out and E flat, A flat, D flat, G flat, B flat, and E flat, so standard tuning, but all down half a step or one fret. And when we do that, our A5 power chord, which would normally be at the fifth fret, becomes an A flat 5. And this is 57, and 7 in the standard power chord shape, down and up. We slide that down by 2 frets and do the same down up. That's a G in the G position at the 3rd fret. Slide it down to the 2nd fret. Work down to the first fret and then an E. Position, like an E5 power cord there, but it's in E flat cos we're in E flat standard tuning, so flat 5. And then mute. Slide. 3rd fret. 4th lap. Importantly, my fingers don't really move when we're playing this riff. We're sliding the whole hand down, first of all, from fret 5 and 72 frets, then 1 fret, 1 fret, and then to E. One last time and then we'll move on to the other steps we can do with this riff, which go from beginner to kind of intermediate, and then pretty advanced. 234. It's a down up scramble. And relaxing the fingers to slide them down, but also muting with the right hand, so we're in control of the guitar. Treble pickup, so the bridge pickup, humbuckers are great, P90s are great also, brown sound setting, uh with all the settings at 12 o'clock is what I've gone for here. Recap over that one last time and then we're gonna do. This kind of thing, so last time. Same riff now, but when we go down up. My right hand is gonna keep going down and up. So this is the strumming pad. For the next part of the riff. This is an intermediate level thing really, if beginners have got this kind of control, you are doing amazingly well. But let me talk you through it cos it's a real gateway thing. We strum. Down up the power cord, and until I relax my fingers, it's gonna keep ringing out. And as soon as I relax, silence, that was from relaxing my fingers, and if I relax after those first two strums. But keep the rami hand going. We get that next part, the chorus riff. We, we're really playing here. So down, up, mutes and 3 and 4 and down, up, mutes and 3 and 4 and. 3 s Sometimes putting the middle finger down, again just relaxing it. What these noises are. They kind of give us notes and they're uh they're natural harmonics. If we don't want those, we can kind of go in between the frets rather than on the frets themselves and that. Gives us more of a Gives us more of that sound cos my finger is muting in between the frets, which doesn't give a natural harmonic rather than. Rather than on the frets when it does, and in between. It gives kind of less. That's also how you play MOR by um. Blur. This bit. Not bad. That's not actually a pedal, it is just. Oh, very cool. So recap over that chorus part, or the first part was just. Chorus parts. There is a final part which is in the outro section of this song, and this is pretty high um high intermediate, getting on to advanced, to do it, to do it well and reliably. There's no way that's easy, that's not beginner level, that's very advanced, but for the sake of completion, I wanna make sure I'm teaching this in full, cos it's the only other bit in the whole song. You could just. Keep going with the chorus riff if you wanted to just jam along to the original, but what they're actually playing at the end there is a down. And then just 00 on string 2. And one, while keeping the power core down. See that I hit string 3, so let me try that again. Missed it again, so let me go again. So here it is one last time, really slow. 234. There's loads more Green Day songs on my website, Andy guitar.co.uk/videos. You will also find, if you like this one, you should also like. I also highly recommend Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which the chorus of which is kind of similar to this kind of thing with power chords ringing out. Super cool, I'll leave a link to those in case you're interested in learning more Green Day power chord songs after this one. It's a great starting point though, add that to your practise routine to get the technique down for this week, and I'll see you next time.