Hey Nineteen Steely Dan Lead Guitar Lesson + Tutorial

The guitar parts are Hey Nineteen from the superb Steely Dan album Gaucho are played by Walter Becker and Hugh McCracken. I'm pretty sure that Hugh McCracken is playing those cool verse comping lead parts and that Walter is playing those gorgeous chords in other parts, he could be playing the intro too.
It really is a superb example of how Steely Dan use space and sparseness so well, the verse are really cool as they have relatively simple chords and leave Hugh McCracken to dig in and come up with some beautiful guitar lines, using a lot of sixths and mainly around the D major tonal centre of the verse. The intro in F#m is so iconic and yet another great example of how a Steely Dan created intros that grabbed your attention instantly.

The song has three main tonal centres, F#m is the intro/chorus, then it goes into D major for the verse (verse is D - D/F# - G - A) - going back to the chorus via this great chord run (Bm7 C#m7, Gmaj7, C#7#9), then in the middle 8 the key changes to Em (Em7 - Cm7 - Bbmaj9 - Asus11). Enjoy!

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Thanks for watching!

My gear for this lesson:
Fender 1960 Time Machine Custom Shop Relic
Logic Pro X
Steinberg CI2 Audio Interface

#steelydan #heynineteen #guitarlesson