Jack White Style

Hi GMC!

Welcome to my new lesson covering the style of a very creative and talented musician called Jack White. Jack is an American musician, singer-songwriter, record producer and multi-instrumentalist. He has become popular thanks to his role as vocalist, guitarists and pianist in the band The White Stripes but also because of many other projects and even his solo stuff.

Music Style:
He is a rock guitarist, connected with sub genres like folk rock, blues, punk blues, garage and alternative rock. He has a very particular style of playing, composing and also uses very unique guitar sounds and instruments (sometimes built by him, or at least modified). In this lesson I tried to recreate his solo style which is one of my favorite albums by him. I’m talking about the one called “Blunderbuss” . In this lesson you will find some riffs very much influenced by him and also a solo in which I tried to recreate his phrasing style.

Tonality, Chord Progression & Scales:
The tune is in B minor tonality and that’s the scale used for composing the riffs and also the solos. It’s a combination of B minor scale with B pentatonic minor and also blues scale. You can find the chords from the progression in the main video and also over the tabs. The scales can be found at the bottom of this page and also in the slow videos. I will give you more details info about this in the slow videos.

Techniques:
His style is more based on sound than technique but we will off course find classic rock techniques like bending, alternate picking, legato, vibrato and slides. This is also a very good lesson for practicing rhythm guitar.

Sound:
I created a Pod HD500 tone exclusively for this lesson trying to emulate his cleaner sound. The patch has some effects which aren't very notorious but help to develop the sound. As you can see in the following pic, I used reverb and delay (there you can check the settings). I activated the tube screamer emulation for the solo and riff 2:



...and these are the amp settings:



The drums have been recorded using SSD 3.5 and the bass with Trillian.

Click HERE if you want to download the patch used on this lesson for Pod HD 500.

Tuning: Standard 440.

Tempo: 90 BPM

Ok guys – here we go!