Roy Buchanan Sweet Dreams Tab

Learning Roy Buchanan's Sweet Dreams on Guitar

The tab for Sweet Dreams isn't particularly difficult, but it demands a specific picking approach that most people mess up. The main riff sits around the 7th to 12th fret area and uses a mix of bend-and-release techniques mixed with vibrato that Buchanan did with his finger, not a tremolo bar. You'll see a lot of notation marked with bends to the quarter-tone or full tone depending on which transcriber you're reading. I spent about three weeks getting this one right, mostly because the timing in the verses is deceptively loose. The written tabs make it look like straight 4/4, but Buchanan was dragging behind the beat just enough to make it feel sloppier than it actually is. If you play it stiffly on the grid, it sounds wrong. I found that setting a metronome to about 90 BPM and playing slightly behind the click helped lock in the feel. The bridge section is where most people fall apart. It's a rapid succession of double-stop bends on the G and B strings, and the tab often omits the fingerings, so you're left guessing which fingers do what. My workaround was recording myself playing along and comparing note-for-note to figure out where my bends were landing wrong. The solo section uses a lot of hybrid picking, which means you're holding a pick but also plucking the lower strings with your free fingers. A lot of free tabs online don't indicate this at all, so the tabs look messy and confusing. You need to be careful with the hammer-ons in the solo. The 12th fret on the high E to the 15th fret hammer-on needs to be crisp, or it turns into mush real fast. Buchanan played with a pretty heavy touch, so if your action is too low, you'll choke the notes out during those hammer-ons. I ended up raising my action slightly and using a heavier gauge pick, something like a Dunlop .88mm, which made a noticeable difference.

One issue you'll run into is the vibrato. Buchanan's vibrato was wide and slow, almost vocal. If you try to copy it by shaking your wrist aggressively, it'll sound frantic. The trick is to rotate from the forearm and let the string move side to side rather than up and down. It takes a while to get used to, but once it clicks, the solo opens up significantly. Another pitfall is the tuning. Some tabs claim it's standard, others say it's close to standard with slight detuning. From what I've gathered listening to the recordings, he was probably in standard tuning but playing through a loud amp with some natural sag or amp compression that made everything sound slightly flat. So if your tab says the 5th fret G string sounds like an F sharp when you play it, check your intonation first before blaming the tab. The outro of the song repeats the main riff several times with varying degrees of feedback and amp noise. Most clean tabs skip all the noise elements, which is fine for learning, but if you want to get closer to the original tone, you'll need to let your amp breathe and let some of those open strings ring out between phrases. I use a Marshall-style amp with the Presence knob turned up a bit, and the volume just on the edge of breakup. That helps replicate the natural decay Buchanan was getting in the studio. If you're struggling with the tab, I'd recommend finding a video tutorial where someone plays it slowly first. Reading tabs alone for this one isn't always enough because so much of the feel is in the micro-timing and dynamics that notation just can't capture. The Rhythm section is straightforward once you get past the intro, but don't rush through it. Buchanan held back a lot of energy in the rhythm playing, and that restraint is what made the solos hit harder when they came in.

I've found that downloading the tab as a PDF and printing it out at a larger size helps a lot. Sitting there squinting at tiny notation on a screen makes you miss details like which finger to use for certain bends. I keep mine propped up on a stand while I practice. Also, the original recording is on the album called That's What I Heard, released in 1970 if you want to reference it.