Roots Archives Forum

Misirlou or any of the other strongly latin influenced Surf tunes would fit in very well as Ska Rock Steady or early Reggae covers - so many of them were adaptations of various latin tunes as were some of the JA tunes.
I suppose the Californians got the influence from Mexico over the border and the Jamaicans picked it up from Cuba, Dominica etc.

As to the string gauge - they don't sound like heavy strings to me but I just read that he uses 16s. That is a fat set of strings! I use 12s these days and they are about as heavy as I want to go!

It's called a "stick line", lots of triplets in the rhythm and heavy palm muting.

@Justin
what style calls it stick line? Reggae?
Interested to know...

Guitar players call this style of playing "palm muting", because you are muting the bridge of the guitar with your palm while you are picking. But in the roots world most roots musicians call this "shadow picking". It gets this name because when you are playing in this style, most of the time you are shadowing the bassline with a couple of ornamintations here and there. In my opinion, the best shadow pick guitar player has to be Clinton Rufus from The Gladiators. Listen to the album The Gladiators & Isreal Vibration live at Reggae Sunsplash and you will see what I mean!



JahRumble