In a recent chat with Ultimate Guitar, Simon McBride named the hardest Ritchie Blackmore guitar part to play and explained why it’s challenging.
The guitarist said most of Blackmore’s music isn’t too hard, but one part in the song ‘Lazy’ bothered him for a long time:
“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.”
The Lick In ‘Lazy’ Still Worries McBride
He detailed this difficult part to play in ‘Lazy’:
“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 noting that says that 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!”
McBride Doesn’t Change Some Blackmore Solos
Simon also previously shared with Guitar Player that while he has the freedom to improvise, some parts, like Blackmore’s solo on ‘Highway Star,’ are too iconic to change. He stated:
“People always ask me, ‘Do you have freedom to improvise in Deep Purple?’ The answer is yes. But there are certain things you just have to play as they were recorded, like Blackmore’s solo on ‘Highway Star.’ It would be very arrogant of me to think that I can do better than that. That’s a brilliant solo. It’s iconic.”
He revealed in the same interview that he felt nervous the first time he played ‘Smoke on the Water’ live but mentioned the importance of keeping the riff simple and maintaining the right tempo.
