Sex On Fire - Kings Of Leon

In this video, we are going for Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon, one of the biggest indie songs of the last 20 years, easily, and we're gonna be looking at two ways to play it. First way, super, super easy, perhaps even a total beginner could actually play the notes that I'm gonna be showing you here. It will be hard to do it up to tempo, you will need to practise a little bit to be able to do it up to tempo, but you could even do this along to the original recording. The second way. Includes two tricky techniques. The first one is playing pairs of strings at the same time, and sliding along one of those strings. We looked at that in an earlier lesson in this series, um, but we're combining that also with the second technique, which is called a unison bend, this thing. So we've done string bending already in this series. Which would just be this. But whenever you hear this sound. And you can always hear that tension, it sounds like a tearing, and I always wondered what that sound was, and the technique is a unison bend. But let's make a start, let's learn the simple way of playing Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon. It begins. With the open E string, we're gonna be playing most of this. On the thinnest Estring. And we're gonna play it 8 times. 12345678. And once we're changing the note, that right hand's just gonna be ticking away 8 for the first half of this riff. 1234567812345678 with the picking, OK? The second note we change to. Is the 7th threat, which we'll play with the 1st finger. It's a B note. We're then gonna go to the 11thre, so that's the hardest one so far because we've gotta do a little jump, but remember if we have our thumb over the top and our fingers on this angle rather than playing like this. In the sort of blues, rock, indie fashion, we can make that stretch much easier cos I'm only stretching in the same way that I kind of play a C chord with. So we can't play lead guitar without knowing some open chords as well. Because we rely on the same kind of skills, those notes are, when we play them. Each note just played 8 times. The final note that we play 8 times. Is on the 2nd string, on string 2, fret 9. Which is the final single dot before the two dots that I have here, and we need to be using these dots to navigate higher up the fretboard. And again we played that 8 times. In total This is the next section. 123. This is the 11th threat to the 9th threat. And then it's 11th threat to 9th threat, but 9 on string 2. So that final part One more time. 1111 9. 1111, 9, but on string two. We're gonna go for the whole thing now, this is the whole simple way of playing this lead line in its entirety, but it is gonna require some practise to get it up to speed and to play along to the original recording. But here's the things we wanna be practising. Ready? In 234. That goes throughout every chorus in this song, you will hear it plenty. The full way of playing it does a similar thing but on pairs of strings. So when we play that first note. It's not just the open E, it's actually the 5th fret. Of string 2, which is also, it's the same note, it's the same E. But we play them together to give us this open, big sound. Makes it chime a little bit more than just. Just one note. We then slide that middle finger all the way up to the double dot at 12th fret. To do that, we have to move early. We move after the 6th strum. 12345678. So kind of move on 78. That's how we get there. Then the 1st finger goes down to that 11th threat here. And we play those together, a bit of tension there, but. It sounds good in context. And then that middle finger, 1 finger lifts off, middle finger goes down to 9. The note that we played before, but again the thinnest string is ringing out. So we've got 4 positions in total, number 1. Number 2 Number 3. And number 4. Each just played 8 times. The palm of my hand is on the thickest 4 strings so that even if I strummed them, they wouldn't ring out. That's the technique that we need here. After all that section we, we then go for a unison bend, which is this. Now this is tough for anyone new at lead guitar, this is probably gonna be too tough to be honest, we just wanna go for a single note bend really. Same as how we've done before. But that unison bend, which I'd just like you to be aware of, has the first finger at the same note as we bend up to. And this is commonly used. It's commonly used on that last octave of the minor pentatonic scale. Um, It's then unbent, bend, bend, and then finishing at 9th, right. Now as I say, what a nice hybrid, uh, would be to play all of the 1st section. And finish with that easier sexton. That would be just a nice hybrid cos this unison bend is much tougher, this idea. This technique is just, you need more strength in your hand and it's strength of very small muscles and and ligaments and to doing the right thing. That can take months. From first attempting it to being able to do it, but it doesn't stop you playing this whole song, this whole lead line, just swap out the last bit. For those few notes. Let me play that once again for you, just so you can see it one last time, and uh we'll play it about 75% of the original recording's tempo. The original is really fast, but if we work on it at 75%, we'll be able to get it to uh up to tempo. 1234. Wish you all the best with your guitar playing journey. See you next time, bye for now.