Re: 36. JANUARY-JUNE 2016 - SLASH AND DUFF JOINS GUNS N' ROSES, TOMMY AND CHRIS LEAVES THE BAND, AXL JOINS AC/DC

by **Soulmonster** Sat Feb 03, 2024 9:34 am

RICHARD AND SLASH TALK ABOUT ARRANGING THE GUITAR PARTS

With the lineup changes in 2016, and Slash rejoining the band, the band returned to a two-guitar set up. Richard would look back at how they had decided who got to play what:

Everybody sort of had their role, I guess, and we would divide it up accordingly. And, I don't know... it changed with every incarnation. You know, it is a difficult thing to divide up and who's going to cover what ground, you know, but I don't know, there was no rules, it went song by song.

The StageLeft Podcast, June 1, 2017

And of course, with Slash coming back he would play the parts he had composed, including one of the solos in November Rain which Richard had played previously:

Slash took that away from me [laughs].

The StageLeft Podcast, June 1, 2017

Now it's like easy because it's like, "Well, hey Richard," you know, "you're just gonna play this because I'm fucking Slash, I'm gonna play," you know, "this is my part." [laughs]

Appetite for Distortion, January 11, 2018

Richard would also say he preferred the two-guitar approach to the three-guitar approach:

Before, you know, there was so much going on and I don't really have that much of an ego when it comes to that stuff. I like to... you know, someone's got to fill it out, you know? It's so much better now, so much more enjoyable.

Heavy Music, June 26, 2018

Slash would later talk about not orchestrating their individual parts but just "doing their own thing":

Richard’s great, man. [...] It’s not my personality, I guess, to want to concentrate on the two-guitar approach, even though I’m always in a two-guitar band. It’s always been, “You’ve got your thing, doing whatever you’ve got to do over there, and I’m doing whatever I do over here.” Usually they work together pretty well. If there’s something specifically that needs to get worked out, like with Richard—because a lot of that Chinese Democracy stuff, obviously, I didn’t have anything to do with writing it, so it was sort of foreign to me—he definitely had his parts and he showed me what some of the other parts were. We would jam the stuff and I would come up with my own interpretation of what those other parts were. But for the most part, Richard just does his thing and I do mine.

Premier Guitar, November 27, 2018