I’ve been working on The Mavericks’ amazing intro riff to La Sitiera, and want to share some insights I learned along the way! Specifically I’ll be talking about lead guitar and finger placement. How do we know which fingers to use on which notes, when learning a tricky riff? It’s often unclear and always slightly different – but there are some general guidelines I’ll explain here to help you out.
Here’s me playing through this main riff twice, with tabs on screen. Finger placement notes included!
Album version (opening track from En Español). Note, at the end of the 6th measure, he’s playing an F note (1st fret, low E string) just before the F# bass note is played. In my tab, I show this as the open low E string. It’s not a huge difference, but his approach adds a nice bit of flavor to things.
Live version:
Another live version:
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