How to play the song Stonehenge by Spinal Tap from their album Smell The Glove or was it from Intravenous De Milo or Shark Sandwich? This guitar tutorial includes all the guitar parts with guitar tab and notation. Here’s a summary from the YouTube guitar lesson with the guitar tab available in PDF format https://paidtabs.com/learningtoplaytheguitar/qAXzzHM8zLw
In ancient times long ago there was a guitar God called Nigel Tufel and his guitar prowess was legendary towering above all others as he played “1” louder than every other guitar player on the planet. His towering guitar prowess is featured on the legendary Spinal Tap song Stonehenge.
This song starts off with some spooky Wah-wah guitar which is a little bit Dazed and Confused perhaps and with the plodding bass it creates an effective spooky intro suitable for the mystical site of Stonehenge.
The verse is based around power chords (root and fifth) as the backbone, underscoring their simplicity and strength in driving rock songs. The progression from A, G, F to other chords demonstrates how minimal chord structures can still deliver dynamic rhythmic impact as strong as the stones of Stonehenge!
Then we move into the prog rock section based around a bunch of chords moving up the neck. We have the chords are based around a B7, an A Minor, C7 to a C# diminished D Eb diminished. This prog rock section uses diminished chords which is not a comment at all on the 18inch high Stonehenge set used by Spinal Tap.
The bridge is very important it’s where the dew drops cry and the cats meow. The bridge is based around a D chord, A minor chord, C power chord, a G power chord and an E power chord for the first half with little variations so be careful not to miss them as they may be only inches high. The second half uses D then the A and then that little melody again. Then we end with an F chugging away…passing up to the G power chord…and chromatic G walking up from fret 5 on the D string 5 6 7 8 takes us back to the prog rock stuff.
In the second half of the song where the Stonehenge set comes down and little children dance around there is a Melody played on the mandolin. I don’t have a mandolin but I’ve learned how to play it on the acoustic guitar so I can show you how to play it here. So here we go with this little power chord on frets 7 and 10 based around D. There four of these chords like ringing out of the bells of Stonehenge if it had bells who knew? Then we have this little melody placed in this position which is based on D major…then it goes back to the spooky intro to finish the song and wonder what would they say to us if we were learning to play this tonight…
