In a new chat with Total Guitar, Simon McBride talked about how playing Ritchie Blackmore’s and Steve Morse’s guitar parts are different.
The guitarist discussed the differences between Blackmore’s and Morse’s styles, saying:
“The Steve Morse stuff is very different to the early Ritchie Blackmore stuff. Steve had a bit of an injury to his wrist, so he doesn’t play the way he did in Dixie Dregs. If I had to play what he did there, I would give up!”
He went on to reflect on Blackmore:
“And with Ritchie’s style, for example, there’s a solo like ‘Highway Star’ that I can’t change. When you’ve got 65,000 people all singing the solo back at you note-for-note, it’s like, ‘Okay, I am so glad I did not change this at all!’ But there are other solos, like the one in ‘Smoke On the Water’, where I changed it around and put my own flavor on it.”
Blackmore’s Every Guitar Part Isn’t Easy For McBride
Still, one guitar part from Ritchie is really challenging for McBride. Earlier in July, the rocker told Ultimate Guitar the following about Deep Purple’s ‘Lazy’:
“Most of it is actually not too bad. There’s one little lick which annoyed me for a long, long time, it’s in ‘Lazy.’ I don’t play the same solo he plays in ‘Lazy,’ but ‘Lazy’ is one of those songs where I feel I can just improvise a bit more and just have a bit more fun with it.”
Simon detailed his point, explaining:
“But there’s this one lick he does in it, and I said, ‘I have to play that.’ And it’s a b*tch of a lick. It’s not ultrafast. It’s just there’s a lot of chromatic stuff in it and slides in a very tight space, within three or four frets, and that’s it. So that, to me, is the hardest thing about playing Purple.”
After saying Ritchie wasn’t very technical, McBride added:
“Even ‘Highway Star,’ the fast part in that, it’s fast, but it’s not John Petrucci from Dream Theater or something ridiculously fast. It’s fast, but it fits the song. But everything else that he played was more just melodies. Ritchie played for the song most of the time. But yeah, that lick in ‘Lazy’ — that still haunts me every night when I come up to it. I’m like, ‘Oh sh*t, don’t screw it up!’”
Ian Paice also recently said that McBride confidently performs Blackmore’s solos. Paice finds working with McBride easy and appreciates that McBride respects the band’s classic songs. McBride understands the importance of Blackmore’s solos and brings his own style while respecting the original music.