Lesson: a country-lick

People always are surprised when I tell them that I not only enjoy to listen to country-music, but also enjoy playing it (yes, I have played in some country-bands as well, and I enjoyed it). I guess I am more into contemporary country, but I like some old school-stuff too.
Anyway, here’s a neat little country-lick, similar to something a country fiddle-player might play. Try to bring this one up to speed and play it with all alternate-picking. A Tele and a neat clean-sound, possibly with a slapback-echo will make it sound even more country-ish. And if you like this one, try to come up with your own country-style ideas, too! Also, picking out stuff by ear from some albums might be quite interesting too. I came up with this lick after hearing some country-album with some HOT fiddle-playing (I dont remember what it was though… might have been something by Marc O’Connor), and transcribing licks and melodies that you hear on albums always is a great way to work on your chops AND your ears…

A few words on the Musikmesse

Its almost been a month now that I went to the Musikmesse, and I completely forgot to write about that. Well, it was fun! =)
It was so cool to meet Mattias Eklundh and Uli Jon Roth again, and I had a great talk with Billy Sheehan. Also watched some really cool workshops and performances. German Schauss (fellow Jemfest-performer) was playing too, and I enjoyed watching and listening to that, and having a little chat. He has an unbelievably economical left hand-technique, it almost looks as if he is not moving at all while playing at about lightspeed. I commented on that backstage at Jemfest, when we were sitting in the dressing room, warming up and getting ready, and he said “Well, I am lazy…” =)

Also very nice to spend some time with the guys of GUITAR magazine, talking about gear and what created a buzz this year. Everyone was talking about the new Fender VG Strat, and I seriously have to check that out soon. Talking about Fender, I saw one of their amazing EVH-replicas up-close, and it truly looks amazing, looks just like Ed’s Frankenstrat. Would have loved to play that, but it was locked away in a display (after all, there were only 300 made and they’re not cheap, so I completely understand they wanted to protect it), and I didnt wanna ask one of the guys to let me play it. Since Eddie probably was the main-reason for me to start playing the guitar (the “Jump” video did it for me), itwas quite a special moment to see this guitar.
Watched Stu Hamm’s performance at the Sound Service-booth, and enjoyed the heck out of that. Great player, and I loved that he played “Flow My Tears”. I have loved that track ever since I heard it the first time on his “Radio Free Albemuth” album… Joe Satriani played on that track, too. Stu performed it solo, singing the slow melodies while playing that bass-riff, tapping and sliding around.
There was a lot of stuff to see and check out, so many great players performing there, and so cool to meet lots of new people and old friends.

Underrated metal guitarists

Nope, I am not trying to list all the players that might be considered “underrated”, as there are too many to list, and different people might add different players to the list anyway. I just wanna list a few that come to mind, as I sit here, listening to some older CDs. I am not that much into classic metal anymore (loved it especially in my teens), but it’s still fun to listen back to some of those old CDs. Without further ado…

Vivian Campbell- I am thinking of the Dio-records he played on in particular.  Great player, and has a killer legato-technique. Back then, I even watched his instructional video a few times, and was blown away by his left hand-technique. Later on I saw Def Leppard live (early 90s), and he played an amazing unaccompanied guitar solo with lots of sweeping. Great stuff. I hear he’s more into blues today, so I gotta check out some of his recent stuff…

Jeff Waters of Annihilator – I still enjoy to listen to older (and not so old) records by bands like Annihilator and Megadeth (or the Metallica-debut). Annihilator isn’t really that well-known, but they’re great anyway. Jeff Waters did some killer-leads, but what I enjoy listening to most is the rhythm guitar. Very precise and accurate, with some very intricate and smart rhythms and riffs. Fun band. Check out “Never Neverland”, or for more recent stuff, “Waking The Fury”

Jake E. Lee – Some of the stuff he has done on those 2 Ozzy-albums he is on is really awesome, veryVan Halen-ish (still love “Bark At The Moon”), but he also did some great playing on the Badlands-album (The song “Rumblin’  Train” has a wonderful blues-style solo, great buildup etc.) and his first solo-album, “A Fine Pink Mist”. Great stuff

Uli Jon Roth – Check out my blog entries on him. He isn’t really playing metal anymore, but the stuff he did on those early Scorpions-album belong into that category for sure

Gary Moore- Tough to say whether those 80s records he did were metal or hard rock or whatever (not a big fan of categories anyway), but in any case awesome stuff. Check out my blog entries on him.

Alex Skolnick – Even though he’s back in Testament (I think?) he seems to enjoy playing jazz these days, and I salute him for going into that direction, taking a lot of flak from Testament-fans who didn’t like the move.
The stuff he did on those Testament-albums really was interesting, quite different from most of the stuff other players from that style did. Check out “The Ritual”.

Al Pitrelli – He’s a member of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, but also was in Widowmaker, Alice Cooper’s tourband, Megadeth, CPR, Savatage… My favorite solo by him is the intro of “Believer” by TM Stevens.

Victor Smolski – Great player both regarding rhythm and solos. Awesome timing and chops, and a great guy as well. Check him out if you haven’t yet!

There are more I could mention, but let’s leave it at that for now!

Mini lesson: A Satriani-lick

OK, I found some licks I had prepared for the “Pulse”, ibreathe’s newsletter. It was supposed to be resurrected and be sent out on a regular base again about a year ago, but since the admins of the site are extremely busy with other projects, nothing happened on that front yet.
So I figured I´d publish those licks here in my blog, as I have published a few “mini lessons” already, and based on some of the emails I have gotten (thanks, as usual!), it seems as those were quite interesting for some of the visitors.
(And if the Pulse ever gets revived, I’ll work on new ones, so if you’re a subscriber, you won’t get the same ones I am gonna publish here).

Here is the first one, a rather short phrase from the song “Memories” by Joe Satriani (from the album “Not Of This Earth“). I always liked the song, and this lick immediately caught my attention. One of the things I always enjoyed to do was: whenever I hear a lick or riff that I like, I immediately (if circumstances allow) pick up a guitar and try to figure it out. It´s not only a good way to train the ear, it also increases the lick-vocabulary, and I always felt that, if there´s a lick that makes you go “Whoa, that’s awesome”, you should try to figure it out right away. It might inspire you to apply the basic idea behind that lick to create your own licks, based on that idea. You don’t necessarily have to learn the whole song either… just work on what grabs your attention.

So here we go… this is from the actual solo-part of the song. I think what I like is the rather big intervals appearing in here, and the fact that the whole thing crosses quite a distance (from the C, or rather the D you bend the C to, to the G on the 10th fret of the A-String).

Measure 1: It starts with the aforementioned bend, then you move into a descending D minor arpeggio. On the G-string, there´s a slide down to A (still part of a D minor, D-F-A), and another short arpeggio-segment (again, notes of a D minor). This part, as mentioned before, is quite a big distance.

Measure 2: This is another cool part, the big interval between the Bb and the G (a major 6th), which, in the context of the whole run, creates quite an interesting sound.  Then it´s back to Bb, followed by two pull-offs until you end on G. So you have a mix of big and smaller intervals.

This lick (or, as hinted at above, kind of lick) works great to move from one area of the fretboard to another, to go from high notes on top to a lower area and lower notes.
Check it out, try to create your own lick based on this one, experiment… and listen to the song and album it´s from.

Mini Lesson: Gary Moore

I figured that, after talking about those old Gary Moore-records, I should create a quick mini-lesson to show you what I meant in that last blog-entry about Gary not only being a great player, but also to show you some of the things that apparently have influenced some other players.
I mentioned PG (in the TAB that belongs to this lesson, there´s this part where Gary goes down to the very low areas of the neck and then ascends again, with a very chunky tone and heavy accents, which reminded me of Paul a lot). Also, if you listen to John Norum (who is a big Moore-fan) you can hear a similar, very aggressive and vicious picking style.

The TAB (check the pdf attached to this) is based on the intro of the song “End Of The World”, an a capella guitar-solo. Years ago, I figured out bits and pieces of it (some guitar mag with a Moore-lesson in it was quite helpful too), so I tried to recreate my TAB of it. It´s not complete, and might have some mistakes in it, but I think I came close.

It starts with a ferocious, descending line with open strings thrown in… classic shred lick. I think that was the one that inspired me to throw in a very similar line into the intro of a song back when I was in a punk/sleaze rock band (!!), mid 90s.
In bars 8 and 9 you have that low bit that I mentioned above. If you wanna play this, play it with an attitude and try to make it sound gutsy.
In bar 12 we have a classic… an arpeggiated C maj7, played with a mix of picking and some pull-offs. Vivian Campbell (Ex-Dio, ex-Whitesnake, in Def Leppard now) used to use this lick quite often in the 80s, Paul Gilbert used it with a minor-arp in his version of “2 Become 1″, and Nuno Bettencourt used it for his awesome intro for the Extreme-Song “Mutha (Don´t Wanna Go To School Today)” (another solo that blew me away when I first heard it).
Its a really cool lick, so if ya wanna use it, work on applying it to different arps and all over the neck, and pay attention to which notes to pick and which to play legato-style… that really helps to get it up to tempo.
Gary used it in different areas of the neck in this solo, and in bar 20, he moves down to the low area again to play some awesome, accelerating picking-stuff.
Anyway, I am gonna stick to the term “mini-lesson” and gonna leave it at that. Check out the song, or the live-version on “We Want Moore!” (which has some different bits, like an example of Gary´s dazzling speed-trilling… when I first heard him do that, I was certain it was tapping, but it wasn´t… amazing left hand)
Hope this was of interest for some of you…

endoftheworld.pdf

Gary Moore

Funny, I just listened to one of Gary´s old live-albums, “We Want Moore!”.
The thing is, I haven´t listen to him in a long time, and I think the last album I bought was “Blues For Greeny” in the mid-90s. I did like some ofthe songs and the playing on his blues-albums (especially the “Blues Alive” album), but the albums after that I haven´t heard, and he singles I heard weren´t exactly my cup of tea.
However, I was a big fan of the albums he did in the 80s… the hard rock stuff. There was so much amazing playing on those… shredding and melodic solos. He always managed to  put together mindblowing solos even if he often only played rather short ones.
Live Gary spread out a bit more, and I remember a bootleg from some 1984 tour that a teacher gave to me. At the end of “ColdHearted” there was an insane guitar-solo which blew me away and totally inspired me to practice.
Now, listening to “We Want Moore” (same period), I notice something else: I once heard Paul Gilbert mention as an influence, saying i.e. that his change of picking style was mainly inspired by watching Yngwie and Gary.
When you read about Paul, hardly anyone ever mentions Gary´s influence on Paul. And the thing is, when I listen to some of the solos on this live-album, I can perfectly tell what Paul liked about it, and how it inspired him. Some bits sound a whole lot like the stuff Paul often plays, certain phrases, dynamics, and of course some of the really fast stuff.
And it´s fun to hear that, to see how Paul took some of that and put it into his own style, to recognize certain little phrasing details that became “Gilbert-isms”. And I am not talking about stealing, but about building your own style from listening to and emulating different players… the stuff we all do.
Check out “Cold Hearted” from that album, both the soloing within the song and the unaccompanied solo at the end (which is based on the intro of “End Of The World”).
And if you haven´t yet, check out some of those other older records by Moore, to, like “Victims Of The Future”, “Dirty Fingers”, “Wild Frontier” or “Corridors Of Power”.