Hotel Californiaby The Eagles

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HOTEL CALIFORNIA

Hotel California is one of those songs that’s popular with bands and has got a really distinctive - and cool! - bass line!

In this tutorial we’re going to out-line the main six parts that you need to play through this tune. Now this line - and the backing track that accompanies this lesson - were made with close reference to the isolated ‘stems’ of the song that were used for the ‘Guitar Hero’

or ‘Rock Band’ version of the song.

Here’s the intro - play these long notes twice:

Next up is the verse - we’ve split that into two sections. Here’s the first section:

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And here’s the second section:

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Following on from the verse is the first chorus:

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The Chorus leads straight into Verse 2 - which is identical to Verse 1. Chorus 2 though is subtly different from Chorus 1:

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After this chorus there is a verse that’s made up of the whole note sec-tion as per the intro for the first half of the verse, and then it uses the full rhythmic second half of the verse as per part 2 of the verse. This leads to a guitar solo - here’s the first chorus of the guitar solo:

The second and third choruses of the guitar solo are pretty similar to this. The fourth chorus though is different and here’s what’s played:

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After this chorus the bass line goes back to the kind of pattern used in the verse as the song fades out - you can see the first three bars or so of this notated at the end of the section above.

And that’s Hotel California!

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How To Program The Sections In Band In A Box:

1. Set key to Bm2. Aim for a performance tempo of around 75 BPM 3. Use a Band Style for practice - the Country Ballad 16th Note real tracks are as good a fit as any - or use the chordal metronome built into Band In A Box.4. Mute the bass!

There are only two sections we need to program - those sections are the verse section and the chorus section. Here’s what the first 8 bars of the Verse section looks like:

Remember to either loop this to make the complete 16 bar verse or copy and paste bars 1 to 8 to bars 9 to 16.

Here’s the chorus section: