“Dimebag” Darrel Abbott was one of the greatest guitarists to bless the planet and as we’ve just passed the 5 year mark of his tragic on-stage murder I decided to take some time to go back and reflect on the music that he brought us.
Dime is most known for his part in the band Pantera, establishing a unique tone and pretty much inventing a groove metal style with his brother/drummer Vinnie Paul. I love most of the work that Dime did in Pantera, but there are some standout tracks for me, mostly when they slowed things down and became more melodic rather than riff driven. Songs like Cemetery Gates, Floods, The Sleep and Hollow provided some of Dime’s most creative solo’s and a really unique approach to the rock ballad.
I decided to learn a couple of Pantera Tracks over the last couple of weeks that I hadn’t gotten around to learning even after all these years. The first is “This Love” from the Far Beyond Driven album. I really enjoy playing this track for many reasons, firstly I simply love the clean guitar intro/verses, the chorus is a very simple yet precise rhythmic riff that focuses as much on the spaces between notes as the notes themselves, there’s a cool little riff (at the 2:48 mark on my vid) that was a fun challenge to learn as it’s a bitt of a finger twister, and then there’s the sublime solo. The real key to this track is timing and accuracy, it’s a lot of fun once you’ve got it down. If you are trying to learn the track, the tuning is a little funky. You need to set your tuner to 450 rather than 440 and then tune the whole thing down 1/2 a step.
The next track I decided to get through was “Floods” from The Great Southern Trendkill album. This is a really distinctive track full of interesting guitar/vocal effects and has a really great use of 9th chords. Dime tuned his guitar all the way down to Db for that really dark sound. For the outro, I used a whammy pedal set to the octave w/+oct1 setting to get that interesting tone, which is something nearer to what Dime would do live with this track. The solo is a lot of fun, I still need to work on a couple of areas (I’d only spent 1 night on transcirbing when I’d recorded this) but the real key is to get those harmonics down in the first section. This is frankly one of my favourite things to play on guitar.
Whilst, remembered mostly for Pantera, Dime also did some stellar work in his new band Damageplan who sadly only managed to release one album which I completely recommend you go away and buy. It’s really sad that we’ll never get to see where this band would have gone but if their first album was anything to go by I’d assume the only way was greatness.
I’d like to thank Dime, not only for the outstanding contributions made to music but also in giving me things to learn all these years after his death. Thanks for everything, you won’t be forgotten.
Phil
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