The John Mayer Song Nobody Can Play

have you ever gotten to a certain place with a riff or a lick where you've got it just just close and just good kind of like a like a c minus a passing grade it's it's there but you know not great there's an old Seinfeld bit about doctors graduating at the bottom of their class somebody had to graduate with the worst grade in the class and is still a doctor they can't all be the best graduating at the bottom of these classes where are these doctors I gotta say for the longest time I've felt like I graduated at the bottom of the class with this stupid riff yes this stupid I I'm not afraid to say it I hate this Rip but like the great Tony Horton told me when I was doing P90X in 2014. I hate it I love it of course I'm talking about the Holy Grail of groovy guitar riffs John Mayer's Neon I had to fly to Miami for that shot I hope you liked it anyway I know this riff has been covered ad nauseum by many people across the internet in the spirit of improvement it's time to improve upon what I put out into the world this mediocrity foreign like I said myself and many of my peers have tackled this little bastard of a riff I gotta say I think we're all pretty much around the same grade except for that one person who screwed up the grade curve for all the rest of us because he got an A plus like a 97 of course if you've ever tried to learn this Riff on YouTube you've probably seen my videos but you've definitely seen this guy named Jamie [Music] I always knew that he was the master of this riff next to John himself and I also knew that he had like a video tutorial course on how to actually learn it note for note but I was content with being a c minus student I didn't want to hang out with them nerds rock and roll baby but that feeling quickly morphed into a small Obsession I was missing the joy the joy of learning nay mastering something and so it began the one piece of lore I knew I must study in order to achieve my potential valedictorian grade a technique that many know but few can truly demonstrate I call it the John Mayer bounce or the mayor bounce simple on paper it takes actually a lifetime to me or until the end of this video to master now of course I've tried to put a little visual stimulation within this video so far because the truth is learning this riff the right way takes a little bit it's kind of boring I'm sorry there's really only one thing you truly have to practice you'll get the chord shapes you'll get the rhythms but the bounce this is a reason that John Mayer only goes over this one technique when he demonstrates how to play Neon step on how to play my song looking like a drum set what it isn't is that sound [Music] that took so long to get it sounds like a freaking machine gun when he does it this happens naturally now but it took a while like to get this sweet spot before I was like like smacking into the thing you know uh it's less is more with this it's very light [Music] you hear that hacking your picking hand has to bounce a little bit in order for this to truly group it's how you get this percussive slap sound you know you can't get that by picking you gotta bounce and slap on this thing but this technique once you get it down will actually maintain your equilibrium between string sets so this bounce it's all that matters so with that in mind I just tried to practice this technique on any instrument that I could find so of course I started with the acoustic so the motion is this slap index thumb on the G index or middle and then a little Chuka there so it ends up being eight Strokes foreign [Music] oh yeah this this is a half step down in so C flat wait uh wait wait wait B now understanding Harmony is a valuable tool as a musician which you can learn about in my app guitar super system if you're interested all the guitar knowledge I've learned after a Berkeley degree in 15 years of teaching guitar check out the link in the description thank you for your support anyway the harmony is important because you can transpose this to other stringed instruments I mean if you can't do the mayor bounce on a ukulele can you really do the mayor Bounds at all [Music] foreign [Music] the Harmony and even embellishing on it will improve your muscle memory so when you actually do go to play the Riff verbatim in simplified it'll be a little bit easier for you [Music] you hear that constant that part right there kind of rings across the measure so you go [Music] that's the really cool minor third sound it just sounds really nice to uh complete this chord progression give it a nice Middle Ground to eventually resolve and I play it differently than John here I play it like this instead of this uh for whatever reason my thumb just doesn't quite get there I can do this chord weirdly enough I can kind of grab it use the The Leverage of my pinky like an anchor and kind of pull my kind of ergonomically fits but yeah this one this is how I go seems like I'm really getting the hang of this thing right but I gotta be honest looking back at the footage my wrist it's not floppy enough it's not snapping it was stiff all the mechanics were there but it wasn't quite right and I understand that there is Nuance to every human mechanic but at this point in the video I'm not there yet I'm still kind of like a b student I just needed to loosen up the wrist which meant practice because you loosen up when you get comfortable with something you tighten up when you're learning something new your muscles aren't used to letting go and just allowing your body to take over so yeah loosening up comes with time but it's time that I have and I'm going to use an age-old YouTube transition move several days later it's always [Music] laughs [Music] turns out it's actually harder to learn this riff just on guitar than to sing and play it who knew anyway I guess I'll just never practice this riff again because I hate it right no you see a great student is constantly learning constantly evolving sometimes that means returning to a place you were and shuring up that Foundation I think the John Mayer bounce could be applied to other chord progressions and you know different rhythmic ideas the sky's the limit but we'll save that experiment for another video I hope you enjoyed this one until next time keep shredding it's always [Music]

Channel: Music is Win

Views: 1,173,965

Keywords: John mayer - neon, neon guitar lesson, how to play neon, how to play neon on guitar

Id: -zAnRr-Dl64

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023