In My Place - Coldplay

The song I'm looking at is "In My Place" by Coldplay. I'm using my Fender Stratocaster guitar to give you an example of the differences and similarities between this and the Les Paul, because there's not a whole lot of difference.

Single Coils vs Humbuckers

What is the difference between this and the Les Paul? Mainly the pickups. We've got single coils here and humbucker pickups which are two single coils together. A simplified way of explaining is we've got double the signal level and half of the hum with humbuckers. We're going to have a little bit of hum with single coils, but they give a brighter, more sparkly sound, a little bit cleaner. I'm going on the clean amp setting and adding a booster pedal in front of a clean amplifier which gives us a little bit louder signal but not a whole lot more overdrive. It just means we have this clean, sparkly tone.

Finding the 12th Fret

We're moving up the fretboard with this one, playing the E note at the 12th fret of string one. We can find that 12th fret by these two dots on this guitar, or just the inlay that has two dots at the top. That's how we know this is 12th fret - this is where our guitar repeats. This is the octave of the open string. We can also play that same note at 14th fret on string four.

String Skipping Technique

I'm going to encourage us to play this using string skipping. We're picking string one, skipping strings two and three, and going to string four. Preferably with an up pick then a down pick, because then our pick's moving in the direction of where it needs to go next. We can hold down our fingers all the time for those two notes. Then the first finger moves to 12th fret string two, third finger goes down 14th fret string two. We do that in a loop four times, finishing on the A note middle finger third string at 14th fret. Let's play this together at 50% tempo and then 75%. We've looked at playing higher up the neck, using an octave technique where we're skipping strings.