I've been toying with learning a rudimentary version of Miles Davis' classic "All Blues" on guitar.

The main harmony is fairly easy. It's a tricked-out blues in G, but the tricks are manageable - the harmony anyway. Don't ask me about doing any kind of acceptable solo. This is just the chords. But the chords, especially the chords for the first four bars of the 12-bar blues structure, are fun to play.

Each bar goes like this:


G7......C.......Dm......C
----------------------------------
3-------5-------6-------5---------
4-------5-------7-------5---------
3-------5-------7-------5---------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------

And swing it hard.

The rest gets squirrely. But that part is pretty simple. And pretty fun to play.

So, I'm grooving on that pattern for a while. Moving it around, seeing what else it can do. And I start to hear it. I'm hearing the intro to the last song on AC/DC's "Back In Black" album: "Rock And Roll Ain't Noise Pollution". Not the whole thing, but a big piece of it.

So I shift it down three frets, change the rhythm a bit. And yep. There it is.


E7......A......Bm.......A......A......Bm...........E7
---------------------------------------------------
0-------2-------3-------2------2------3------------
1-------2-------4-------2------2------4------------
0-------2-------4-------2------2------4-----------2
--------------------------------------------------2
--------------------------------------------3^----0-

Sounds like Angus doesn't play the D string in first few bars of the intro, so maybe those chord names don't really apply. But once it gets loud, he's playing full chords. And I think they sound right. Hard to tell exactly. That Bm might be slightly off. But not by much.

Either way. While it's not exactly the same riff - and I couldn't find anything saying AC/DC were fans of "All Blues" - it's certainly a relative. And if you can play one, the other is right there waiting for you.

Fun pattern, that. Versatile!