Start Choppin’ by Dinosaur Jr. (solo)

Dinosaur Jr. are well catered for in guitar tab world, but many transcriptions of this solo from their ’93 single Start Choppin’ aren’t quite right.

Taken from their 1993 album Where You Been, this is one of the band’s defining hits. That said, I didn’t “get” Dinosaur Jr. at the time. Now older and wiser I’ve come to hold J. Mascis in high regard. His chaotic, meandering, and (unusually for the genre) often major-key solos are instantly recognisable as him, and in my book that’s a hallmark of a great player.

Anyway, let’s get on with the lesson. As a bonus, I’ve thrown in a couple of quick tips for playing the rhythm parts too.

Lesson

We’re in E standard tuning here and, if you’ve got one, a guitar with a wiggle stick is the optimal choice. 

Quick tips on the rhythm parts

First of all, if you listen closely to that first B minor chord after the intro, you’ll notice J. is hitting the F# in the bass. Same thing with the D sus 2, with an A in the bass. This puts a perfect 4th under the chord which really adds oomph — especially with Dinosaur Jr. levels of fuzz and volume. It’s something you’ll hear in a lot of 90s rock. 

Second, the single notes in the verse can sound incongruously weedy when you’re playing the song solo at home. To get around that, try using hybrid picking to mirror the descending D to Db played by the bass guitar in the recording. 

Solo

The song is in A major, and the solo uses familiar A major and A major pentatonic patterns. If you know the minor / minor pentatonic scale, you know major too. Just move your patterns backwards by three frets to find the relative minor. So, in this case, we could look at it as playing F# minor shapes — just treating A as the root. 

Looked at that way, the opening phrase is a fairly typical pattern in the pentatonic box at the 14th fret:

This gives way to a second phrase which is more improvised, giving the vibrato arm some serious welly:

Then on to the meat of the solo. We start in the F# box at the 2nd fret, before moving up an octave to the 14th and finishing with a quick flurry of some hammer-on/pull-offs:

The next segment’s main challenge is hitting the rhythmic accents as we descend the scale, via some double stops:

And finally, the big finish with some natural harmonics and and gratuitous whammy bar action: