Hello everyone! This is Ryan from the Ontario Guitar Studio. Today we’re going to learn how to play Marunouchi Sadistic (丸の内サディスティック）by Shiina Ringo (椎名林檎).
In case you’ve never heard this song, this song is one of the major J-Pop standards in Japan. It’s an incredibly fun song to learn and play on the guitar as well!
About Shiina Ringo
Shiina Ringo is considered to be one of the most critical artists in Japanese rock music. While she comes from a classical music background, her music and lyrics has always been filled with experimentation with elements of classical, jazz, noise rock, while always keeping it in line with a sense of pop-like sensibility.
What you can learn from Marunouchi Sadistic
New chords (4-part chords)
Cool Left Hand Rhythm Pattern
Right hand muting
So first, we’ll start with the chords you’ll need for this song.
As you can see, there’s some chords you might know already, as well as some chords you might be unfamiliar with. However most of the unfamiliar chords are actually built on chords you might have already studied!
The sections of Marunouchi Sadistic
So the song contains three major parts.
Intro/Chorus
Verse
Bridge
The final verse of the song is slightly different than the regular verse, but we’ll tackle it when we get there.
Intro/Chorus
This part of the song is the main rhythm of the song. By learning this part, we actually can learn most of the song!
Verse
This is the part of the song that is probably the most the thematic or memorable for most people! The one point we should be careful about with this part is to make sure we have a solid right-hand mute right after playing the F and E7 chords.
If you’d like to see a video breakdown of this part, check out this video, where I go into a bit more detail, and some visual examples as well!
Bridge
Next we have the bridge. The bridge is super straight-forward rhythm-wise, but we do have some
chords we haven’t played before in the song popping up.
When I usually teach this song, that Gm7 (G minor seven) is usually a tricky chord for most people to play on the guitar. Mainly because out of all of the chords in this song, this song is the one barre chord that we have to play.
The best way to get used to it is to build up finger strength with lots of practice. Don’t give up!
Finally, we have one more verse, however rhythm-wise, it’s a bit different than the normal verse part.
Check out my play-through of the song here to see and hear how it’s played.
Conclusion
And that is Marunouchi sadistic in a nutshell! A very fun song to play on the guitar, almost guaranteed to impress anyone familiar with J-pop!
If you'd like to download the guitar tab for this song, you can download it here at piascore.
If you’d like to continue learning fun guitar songs like these, definitely give my lesson a try! Click here to book a free trial lesson, and let’s get started today!