There are songs where you learn four separate chords, and there are songs where you learn one chord shape, slide it around like a smug little slug, and suddenly you sound like Andy Summers in 1979. Message In A Bottle is gloriously the second kind, which is why guitarists love it and bass players quietly resent how much attention it gets.
This 17-second clip is the intro riff — that jangly, arpeggiated add9 figure that opens the whole thing before Sting has even finished sending his S-O-S to the world. It's the riff everyone air-guitars and almost nobody can name the chords of. Let's fix that.
How this add9 riff works
The whole intro is one moveable voicing — a stacked add9 shape — shifted through four positions: C#m(add9), A(add9), B(add9) and F#(add9). In C# minor that's a i – VI – VII – IV walk, and the magic ingredient is the add9: you're stacking the root, the fifth, the octave and then the ninth (the second scale degree) right on top. That ninth rubbing a whole step below the octave is what gives the riff its shimmering, unresolved, message-drifting-out-to-sea sound. It's technically an add9, close cousin of the sus2, and if the naming feels fuzzy, my page on chord names untangles it.
Concrete takeaway: don't strum it — pick it. This is an arpeggio, one string at a time, letting every note ring into the next. Fret the shape once, keep your fingers glued together, and simply relocate the same hand up and down the neck. Learn the shape, not four chords, and the intro basically plays itself.
If your ninth stops ringing the moment you shift, congratulations — you've discovered why Andy Summers got paid and you're reading a blog. Keep the fingers loose, the notes overlapping, and if you want the PDF and Guitar Pro file to nail it, they live on my Patreon.