Learn how to play the guitar like Johnny Ramone
Only a few people can credibly claim to have invented an entire style of guitar playing. Chuck Berry with rock and roll lead guitar, Dick Dale for surf rock, and Tony Iommi with heavy metal make up a relatively short list. But one person has to be included on that legendary list, too: Johnny Ramone. Born John Cummings in Queens, New York, Ramone created, perfected, and established punk rock guitar with all of its essential elements during his tenure in The Ramones. Everyone who came after was rendered redundant – Johnny Ramone was the expert from the moment he plugged in.
The roots of Ramone’s playing style were in the now-classic but the then-vilified mould of The Stooges and The New York Dolls, two bands that only the freaks and weirdos of the early 1970s liked. Thanks to masters of simplicity like Ron Asheton and Johnny Thunders, Ramone adopted an economical style of guitar playing from the very outset. He was so dedicated to it that when The Ramones needed guitar solos, or additional lead lines played in the studio, hired guns and personal friends were employed. Ramone wasn’t interested, he wanted to play power chords.
Two elements of Ramone’s guitar playing were revolutionary in their simplicity. The first was his use of power chords: throughout the entire Ramones catalogue, from Ramones to Adios Amigos, Johnny based nearly every guitar part around power chords or barre chords. No fully-voiced shapes, no substitutions, and no refunds. The directness of his chord shapes stripped away all the unnecessary noise and clutter from The Ramones’ music.
The second was downstrokes: exclusively downstrokes. “I guess that before me, people played downstrokes for brief periods in a song rather than the whole song through,” Ramone told Guitar Player. “It was just a timing mechanism for me.” A way to stay on the beat soon evolved into a signature style that virtually no one else could replicate. Upstrokes generally add a feeling of funk and syncopation to music. Ramone completely eliminated that from his technique, helping to shape The Ramones’ sound in the process.
If you’re trying to replicate Johnny Ramone’s guitar sound, power chords and downstrokes will help turn any guitar into a machine gun of punk fury. But Ramone’s signature style had more to it than just what he did with his hands. Throughout his three decades of professional playing, Ramone continuously gravitated towards the same equipment, dialling in the signature Ramones sound with his trusty arsenal of guitars and amplifiers.
If you want to get exactly what Ramone used, then you have to pick up a Mosrite guitar. Mosrite was a California-based instrument company that excelled in low-cost products. In other words, they were guitars that Ramone would afford. If you want an instrument with a wide variety of tones and sonic possibilities, you’re looking at the wrong guitar. If you want the perfect instrument for punk rock, then you’re all set.
Ramone favoured the Ventures II ‘Slab Body’ model but wasn’t picky. It was more that Ramone liked Mosrite as a brand rather than choosing a specific model, with the guitarist having owned numerous different models of guitar across his career. He occasionally picked up other guitars, even having a brief dalliance with Fender Stratocasters once The Ramones were established, but Ramone continued to favour Mosrites throughout his life.
One of the problems that The Ramones faced in their earliest days was that their amps couldn’t keep up with their volume. After blowing out numerous cabinets, Johnny finally found the perfect setup: two Marshall 100-watt cabinets with matching 4X12 heads. All of Ramone’s tone, volume, and distortion came from these amplifiers. He never used pedals, preferring instead for his gear to reflect his playing philosophy: simplicity over all else.
With all of those technical specs in place, Ramone was ready to get the most out of his gear. A furious barrage of aggression erupted from his amps at every show, whether he was playing in a stadium in South America or a dinky club in New Jersey. Over three decades with punk’s premiere band, Johnny Ramone crafted a style that was widely imitated but rarely replicated. Scores of artists tried (The Ramones have a credible claim as one of America’s most influential bands), but nobody ever got close: Johnny Ramone was as singular and inventive as they came.
