Jerry Reed - The Claw- Guitar lesson with TAB
So you want to learn The Claw...you came to the right place. The Claw is a great finger style guitar workout, especially on steel string guitar.
I imagine it's called The Claw because your picking hand forms a claw- since you have to use your ring finger to grab notes during the chorus and breakdown.
I recommend growing out your nails slightly and using a thumb pick- I like a Dunlop Ultex, they're cheap and bright which is good since you'll sometimes be muting the strings as you thumb them.
I think of the song as being comprised of three parts:
1) Intro/Melody
2) Chorus/Chords
3) Breakdown
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1) Intro/Melody
There's two tricky parts here. The first is not getting your fingers tripped up on the intro lick. I've found the best way is to fret the second note with my middle (rather than ring) so that after the slide I can easily grab the following note with my index:
Soon after there's this part here, which is a strange and hard way to play it, but required to get the 'pull off as an after thought' sound that it produces:
Play an "A" chord with your index and use your pinky to fret and pull off of the 5th fret of the D string.
2) Chorus/Chords
This part is straight forward but the rhythm is a bit tricky. I use the pinky on my fretting hand to go between fretting the chords and grabbing the G bass note of the A7/Am7 chord and the C bass note of the D7/Dm7 chord here:
Take the triplet pull off part slowly and practice with a metronome or backing track (available above).
3) Breakdown
The breakdown is a lot of fun once you familiarize yourself with it. It starts halfway through the first measure here:
Then it pretends to go back into the chorus but holds on E7. It then goes into this flurry here:
It finally finds it's way back intro the intro/melody part:
Except for when it's about to do the 'triplet pull off' trick it goes back into the chorus part instead.
Ending
You could end it with the intro lick or go crazy like Jerry Reed. I offer a jazz/blues turnaround ending suggestion at the end of the video above. If you have a band backing you you could get some great sounds playing over all of the dominant 7th chords.
There's some downloadable resources above: a printable PDF, an interactive TAB (TEF file), and the backing track at three different speeds above. Enjoy!