John Sykes Is This Love Guitar Solo TAB

Hey guys, Diego here. For this video I transcribed and performed John Sykes’ guitar solo from Is This Love, based on the live version he played in 2004.

What I really like about this solo is the way Sykes works with E minor pentatonic in a ballad setting. One sound that comes up a lot is the 9th of E minor. He often takes that 9th and bends it up a half step into the minor 3rd of the E minor chord.

That is a very melodic sound. You hear this kind of idea all over rock ballads and melodic rock playing: the 9th creates that little bit of tension, and then the half-step bend resolves it into the minor 3rd. Sykes keeps coming back to that sound throughout the solo, and it becomes an important part of the way the melody develops.

There is also a clear Em7(9) arpeggio idea near the beginning. This is one of the things I find interesting about analyzing a solo like this. You can say, broadly speaking, that he is using E minor pentatonic and E natural minor, and that is true. But when you look a little closer, you start seeing the specific sounds he is pulling out of those scales: the E minor triad, the 9th, and the Em7(9) arpeggio sound.

This is exactly the kind of thing I like to work on with my private students. Instead of only learning the notes of the solo, we look at the harmony behind it and connect the phrases to the scales, triads and arpeggios we are studying.

With a solo like this, for example, I might have a student work on E minor pentatonic, the E minor triad and an Em7(9) arpeggio first. Then we go back to the solo and identify where those sounds are actually happening in the music.

That is when theory starts to become useful.

The goal is not just to memorize a scale shape or an arpeggio and play it up and down the neck. I want the student to recognize those sounds inside real music. Once you begin to understand why a guitarist is choosing certain notes over a particular harmony, those ideas can gradually become part of your own melodic vocabulary when you improvise.

So yes, on the surface this is mainly E minor pentatonic mixed with E natural minor, but the interesting part is how Sykes uses individual elements from those sounds to create the phrases.

The live version also has a different ending from the studio recording. Sykes adds a faster run through E natural minor as well as a sequence of natural harmonics, giving the 2004 performance its own character.