Little Town of Bethlehem by John Mayer

Intro & Tone

It blew my mind how perfectly this track went with a John Mayer-style groove. We've worked out two incredible parts that are dripping in style & groove (if I do say so myself). The aim here was to create a pop-soul kind of groove where we can have a cool chord part littered with fills, and a simple lead part that requires a bit of restraint and good feel to play. So, let's start with the tone.

The base of our tone is using a Fender 65 Deluxe Reverb style preset in TONEX by IK Multimedia. This had that John Mayer tone straight away. It's clean, it's crystal clear, but it feels like it has a lot of headroom, creating that thundering low-end sound that sits menacingly behind the clean tones. We also added in some reverb and compression, like this:

As you'd expect, we used a Strat to record this part. This is more based on John Mayer's Continuum era playing, which was before the signature PRS model. We also used an Ibanez Tube Screamer pedal, on top of the amp settings above to get the lead.

The Lead Guitar

For the lead guitar part, we are based in the key of F major, and therefore we are using the F major scale, Box 1, as shown in the fretboard diagrams. We are also moving between using our fingers and a pick in different sections, which is something to look out for and work on.

The Rhythm Guitar

Finally, let's take a look at the core chord movements for this track. On top of these basic chords, we are very much using our CAGED system to identify w hichscale boxes are working under each chord shape, and therefore playing a little lead fill to make it sound very John Mayer. If you need more help with this theory, check out our Unlocking Major CAGED course.

If you'd like to get more to grips with John Mayer's style, get started with the John Mayer Player Study today!