I recently had the pleasure of seeing Slint live in Boston and it cleared up some of my misconceptions about how they play guitar. Here’s how to really play the high guitar riff from “Nosferatu Man”.
Notes on the tab:
(A) The harmonics used here are not directly above the third and fourth frets, they are a little to the right of the third fret, and a little to the left of the fourth. They are also very quiet, so Pajo plays them with a lot of distortion to beef up the volume.
(B) In order to bend the note at the end of the phrase, Pajo moves his left hand over to the string behind the nut and pushes the string down (see here, Pajo is on the right side of the screen).
That is not the what the internet said (see here for the common tab) but, now, yet another problem with the internet is fixed.
And here are two reflections on their style:
1. Slint are more elegant than you think. Playing a melody line out of natural harmonics is quite wonderful; simple to play but difficult to conceive, which is almost the definition of elegance.
2. Slint do not use pinched harmonics, which is a minor point of disagreement with Scott Tennent’s otherwise wonderful 33 1/3 book on Spiderland. Instead, they use a lot of the natural harmonics (the 3rd and 4th fret harmonics are also used at the end of “Good Morning Captain”). In fact, whenever you hear the squealy sound of the Nosferatu Man lead (as in the B-section of “Breadcrumb Trail”) it seems that Pajo is simply playing natural harmonics with a Boss Heavy Metal pedal (at least, that’s what I recall from his pedal board).
(Image: Pitchfork Media)
WIWO 