GN’R guitar champ Slash remembered the music that marked his childhood and drove him to pick up the guitar, saying on the Sixx Sense (transcribed by UG):
“‘Whole Lotta Love’ – to me that was the soundtrack for what the ’70s were gonna be. It was so driving and it was so sexy. I think that song is what initially turned me on to the Les Paul because of the sound of that guitar.
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“I think a lot of Zeppelin stuff – ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ ‘Black Dog,’ ‘The Ocean’ was a good one… If we just sat here I could go through all the records. ‘You Really Got Me’ from The Kinks was great…
“There were a lot of The Who records. When I was a kid living in England my dad was a huge rock ‘n’ roll fan, a huge Who fan. So there was a on of really cool Who riffs. ‘Magic Bus’ was a great one.
“You’ll be messing around and a succession of notes will go by. It will catch your ear and you’ll go back and sort of suss out what it was. And they come from just jamming with the drums a lot of times. Riffs are a very much rhythmic thing, and if you’re just jamming with drums and things will pop out.”
During the rest of the chat, Slash expressed his fondness of odd key signatures, saying:
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“I use the metronome on my phone sometimes. I have a tendency to write in weird key signatures, not intentionally. So sometimes I’ll use a metronome just to check out what it is that I’m doing to see how that works.
“I could be jamming something in my hotel room all night the night before soundcheck, then come into soundcheck and go ‘Check this out!’ And realize that as soon as the drums start to come into it it’s completely different than what I thought.
“It’s a discipline but it’s a good thing because it teaches you to play in time, obviously. But one of the great things is – as a soloist or somebody who just jams a lot – you can have a tendency to speed up and do all kinds of stuff at your whim. Which isn’t really conducive to playing in a band situation.