Weekend Lick

I've been listening to a lot of Fates Warning lately, thanks to the release of their stunning new album. After listening to that new album a number of times over the weekend, I switched over to the band's previous effort, 2011's Arch/Matheos album, Sympathetic Resonance.

While listening to one of the guitar solos on that album, my ears caught a really interesting lick from lead guitarist Frank Aresti. It is innovative and familiar at the same time, which is always an appealing combination in music.

Let's take a quick look at the "standard" version of the lick. This is a lick that nearly every guitarist knows how to play. It is a straight forward blues lick which, thanks to the magic of high gain amplification, can be played at lightning-fast speeds to the delight of fans everywhere:

When you get comfortable with this lick, you can play it with a single pickstrock on the high-E.

Aresti, however takes gives this lick an interesting update by adding a single tapped B note to every iteration. The result gives the lick some interesting characteristics. First, it makes the lick sound less like a bunch of annoying blues notes, and more like an Em7 arpeggio. Second, the extra note converts the phrase into a series of repeating quintuplets, which gives the passage a much smoother flow. That is to say that repeating 16th notes can often sound metronomic, while repeating quintuplets tend to sound a bit less robotic, and a little more groovy.

So, here's the lick as updated by Frank Aresti:

One of the major benefits to learning this lick is that it involves a vocabulary that you probably already possess, so it won't take long to learn; but meanwhile, you'll have injected a breath of innovative shredding into your playing.

Give it a try, and see how it goes!

Sometimes Good Ideas Don't Take

Coming up with ideas is a skill that gets better with practice. Those of us who regularly come up with ideas (set aside the question of whether any of them are good ideas for now) know that it's not really about being the world's most brilliant or creative person. It pretty much comes down to the idea of getting into the habit of coming up with stuff. Not a big deal.


Even if you come up with a brilliant idea, there is no guarantee that it will be adopted by others.

For that matter, there is no guarantee that you will adopt your brilliant ideas yourself. So it goes with one of my better ideas, that I unfortunately did not really adopt: Project Guitar God.

Sometimes, the reason an idea doesn't stick is because its time hasn't yet come. In hopes that this is the case for PGG, I would like to provide a quick guide to my previous Guitar Exercises of the Week. Perhaps with greater dedication, I can make some better headway on this.

• Episode One
• Episode Two
• Episode Three
• Episode Four
• Episode Five
• Episode Six

 Work on these in your spare time, and perhaps we can add to the list!

Guitar Exercise of the Week

Stationary Waves reader ZK has been asking me to put together my long-ago promised second sweep-picking exercise, and I have finally gotten around to it.

This is a long exercise. Unlike the previous exercises, this one is more of a true etude, designed to be both musical and rigorous. There is no easy way to go about this, and nothing I can tell you to help speed it up. Pay attention to the pickstroke indicators so that you get the sweeps correct.

The denser arpeggios will sound jarring and dissonant when played at slow speeds, which should give you plenty of incentive to get them up to higher speeds more quickly.

As a final note, I had to break the exercise into five separate jpegs. I apologize for that.

Without further ado, here is "Study #1."

Guitar Exercise of the Week

This week, I have two exercises that should help you develop some speed techniques.

Precision Nightmare
The first is a relatively simple exercise in theory, but at high speeds becomes incredibly difficult to play accurately.

The trick with this one is to have some self control. It's easy to cheat on this exercise and allow yourself to go faster and faster before you're truly ready for it. You'll know you're ready to increase speeds when every note is perfect. If you can play every note perfectly except for one, then you're not ready to increase speed yet.

It's vitally important to ensure that each note rings true on this one, otherwise you will simply be practicing a dumb exercise that reinforces bad habits. Do not allow yourself to progress to higher speeds until you have ensured that you are picking absolutely, positively every single note without "flubbing" any. Ensure that each note rings out true, with good tone. Do not practice bad habits.

I call it "Precision Nightmare," and it looks like this:

Dewey Ewey
This next exercise is both a great way to improve your speed and a great way to explore some different left hand fretting patterns. I have written this out in the Phrygian Mode, in the key of B-minor, but as you practice it, feel free to try similar patterns in every position. You will discover some interesting melodic ideas that you may not have considered before.

This is primarily a legato exercise that will help you develop left-hand finger speed. You can never have too much of that. As you practice, try to get a nice percussive sound out of your hammer-ons. You can slightly mute the strings in licks like this to create some interesting textures in the context of guitar solos. You can also apply artificial harmonics to the string with the edge of your palm, creating some Van Halenesque sounds.

These passages sound best as a flurry of notes, but you will have to build your dexterity to get there. Here it is:

Guitar Exercise of the Week

This week's guitar exercise is by request: faithful Stationary Waves reader ZK asked me to put together a sweep picking exercise, which I have done.

We will call this the first of two sweep-picking exercises. The reason I'm splitting this up is because, in my opinion, the major difficulty with sweep-picking (i.e. playing arpeggios across sequential strings in a single up-stroke or down-stroke) is not the sweep itself, but rather the transition.

So, when I developed this exercise I decided to focus on passages that would emphasize the transitions, rather than the sweeps. Focusing on these transitions should give you better control over the plectrum. You won't simply and wildly be trying to sweep, resulting in a garbled mess. When you get this exercise down right, it should sound pretty good at both slow speeds and high speeds. Sometimes it can actually be more difficult to sweep slowly than quickly, because you have to have a lot of picking control to give each note the proper rhythmic duration. That tight, metronomic accuracy is what makes the difference between a killer sweep-picked arpeggio and a garbled mess.

Exercise #6: "Turning Heads"
The only real oddity in this exercise is that it begins with an upstroke. This may seem illogical to you at first, but when you start cycling through this exercise over and over, you will eventually understand why it's more comfortable to begin with an upstroke.

For those of you unfamiliar with the notation, the "v" in tablature indicates an upstroke. The squared-off "u" indicates a downstroke.

Here it is, without further ado:

Start this one slowly, at something like 70bpm (or maybe even less, depending on your skill level) before you start tackling the high speeds. Remember, the goal here is picking control. You'll have better success if you make each note sound very nice at slow speeds than you will if you try to burn through this one too early. We want a clean, appealing passage, not a garbled mess.

When you're comfortable with this one, I'll post a second sweep-picking exercise that involves more strings and more notes. You'll find that one much easier if you have a good handle on this one.

This exercise also functions as an excellent warm-up.

Good luck!

Guitar Exercise of the Week

I'm happy to report that I have marked improvement again this week. I've managed to bring Hell's Effervescence up to about 120bpm, while my continued work on Sextuplet Time and Strung Out have brought my speed on those exercises up to 88bpm and 138bpm, respectively. Recall that my original goal for Strung Out was 150bpm, so I am getting closer all the time. (My pie-in-the-sky dream for Sextuplet Time remains awfully elusive at this point, however.)

This week, I'd like for us to work on our groupings. These next two exercises seem simple at first, but getting the tempo and feel right can prove to be a challenge at higher speeds.

Exercise 4: Merge Without Blocking Traffic
We've all had to merge onto the freeway. The ramp is small, and we have to get up to speed quickly, but the real test of good driving is whether we can, once up to speed, merge into heavy traffic without slowing down or causing anyone else to slow down.

In the spirit of that disjointed, two-part endeavor, I have created Merge Without Blocking Traffic. The exercise is rather straight-forward. We begin with a 16-note ascending pattern. Once finished, we change time signatures to 3/4 and descend in the same note pattern via sextuplets.

Repeat this pattern two times, and two times only, then reverse the orientation. During measure #5, we stay in 3/4 and ascend in sextuplets, changing the fingering slightly to accommodate the rhythm. Then, we descend in a 16th-note pattern.

Obviously, what's tricky about this one are the transitions. Here's what it looks like:

Exercise 5: Balance Beam
I call this next exercise Balance Beam because when one walks along a balance beam, it's not difficult at all... at first. A few steps later, you find you leaned a little too far to the right and have to compensate by leaning left; this again requires compensation by leaning to the right again. What was at first easy quickly spins out of control. One false move, and you lose your balance entirely, tumbling off the beam.

Similarly, the trick to this exercise is ensuring you never get too far ahead - nor too far behind - the beat. If you don't play it exactly, you may never catch up to the point where you're back "on" the beat. You'll have to start over.

The idea is this: play the world's most over-played 16th-note runs... but play them as sextuplets. Easy in principle, but a real challenge if you're gunning for accuracy.

Playing this exercise accurately at high speeds is one of the most impressive licks you'll ever master. I admit: I stole the 2nd measure from the guitar solo in Extreme's Get the Funk Out. While that solo gets a lot of attention for its near-impossible tapping arpeggios, this forgotten lick is the type of thing that sets people like Nuno Bettencourt and Warren DiMartini apart from the rest of the 80s guitar crowd.

Make sure you play the hammer-ons and pull-offs. Picking those notes is cheating. You'll cover up your mistakes with the sound of the pick attack. Mastering this as a combined legato-staccato lick is when you'll know you've really got it.

Here it is:

Guitar Exercise of the Week

Well, my friends, I am happy to report that my daily guitar exercises were extremely productive this week. I managed to bring "Sextuplet Time" up to a speed of 84bpm, and "Strung Out" up to a speed of 124bpm. I'm not done yet. I'll continue working on these every day until I get them up into the neighborhood where I want them.

That said, it's been a week, and it's time for something new. This week, I've developed something a little more complex, so rather than giving you two straight-forward exercises, I'd like to stick to just one killer.

Exercise 3: Hell's Effervescence
So named because playing this kind of technique reminds me of the bubbles in a boiling pot of water, this exercise combines several different aspects of guitar-playing theory into one brutal exercise.

Normally, exercises of this kind are played using a sweep-picking technique. Metalheads love this kind of stuff because it sounds evil, and it's also a "classic shred" kind of a sound. But do not use sweep-picking for this exercise. As you'll see from the diagram, our job is to play through the exercise using a combination of hammer-ons-from-nowhere and tapping. In other words, it's pure legato, baby!

This exercise was inspired first by Tony MacAlpine, who has a tendency to lay off his picking hand when he's doing sweep arpeggios. He plays them legato sometimes and merely pantomimes the sweep with his right hand. Hey, no harm, no foul. Another great example of arpeggios played as hammer-ons-from-nowhere are the fast bits in Extreme's "Play With Me."

But the best example of this I can think of is Joe Satriani's "The Mystical Potato-Head Groove Thing."

So, as you work your way through this exercise, work on the following:

• Keep the tempo even.
• Keep the sound percussive, and try to make it sound like you're actually picking the notes.
• Try muting the strings with your picking hand like Satch; then cross-over for the final taps. Moving your hand back and forth from behind to in front of your fretting hand is a great performance visual that will take your live shows to the next level.

As an added complication, I've written this exercise in the key of Eb. This will help get you out of the the whole E, A, D frame of mind and hopefully get you thinking about the notes you're playing, rather than just going on auto-pilot and playing the same arpeggios you've already done to death in other exercises.

Here's what it looks like:

Guitar Exercise of the Week

As promised, today I am going to provide and discuss a couple of guitar-playing exercises to help you (read: me) develop your (read: my) technique on the instrument.

I said yesterday that I would likely be starting these exercises at about 140bpm and working my way into the 175 range. While that tends to be the case for solos that I write, which involve whole, half, quarter, eighth notes, etc., I discovered last night that these exercises should be played a lot slower, initially.

The reason for this is because, first of all, they involve only one kind of note (sextuplets in the first case, and sixteenth notes in the second case). This means that I have to push myself to maintain a constant speed. The second reason is that, as exercises, they are a bit more difficult than my solos tend to be.

At any rate, we are not doing anything incredibly difficult for week number one. I wanted to start out somewhat easy and work my way up, over the coming weeks.

Exercise 1: Sextuplet Time
Our first exercise today is based on... pretty much every metal shredder with a YouTube video. Nothing says speed and evil quite like shredded sextuplets in a minor key. For added dexterity, I have incorporated string skipping into the exercise as well.

For me, the descending part of this exercise is the most difficult part. You will have to move your fretting hand a lot more than during the ascension. In addition, if you're not holding the guitar in a comfortable position, with good posture, then you will find this one more difficult than it needs to be. Once you get it up to a nice speed, though, the picking hand starts to feel really good, and the notes really start to shine, despite the scalar nature of the exercise.

I started out at 50bpm during the "learning phase," in order to get a feel for how the exercise "felt." Over the course of a couple of hours, I worked my way up to 72bpm. Of course, the goal over the coming weeks is to play this exercise ridiculously fast. 165bpm would be nice, but that's pretty out-there for me at this juncture.

Here's how it works:

Remember, this is an alternate-picking exercise, so no cheating. Do not play this legato, do not use economy picking. You'll only thwart your own objectives in the long run.

Exercise 2: Strung Out
This next exercise is loosely based on something I saw in an interview with Yngwie Malmsteen, but it underlines a concept that is common to guitar-playing in general. The basic idea is to take a single note pattern on a single string and move it up and down the same string in either an ascending or descending pattern.

You can use phrases like this in solos as a convenient way to get from one location on the neck to another. Because it's based on a diatonic scale, it also has the convenient feature that once you're practiced through every conceivable pattern, you can play it in any scale without thinking too much about what you're playing. So it fits anywhere, over any chord; that's nice. Unfortunately, though, it also sounds quite cheesy.

What I like about this exercise is that the right hand and the left hand are moving almost independently of one another. All you really have to do with your picking hand is tremolo pick; after that, your fretting hand does the rest of the work. It also has a nice physical feel to it. Once you get it up to speed, the rhythm of the exercise takes on a completely different vibe in your mind. Try it out, you'll like it.

I started this one out at about 75bpm to get a feel for it, and worked my way up to 104bpm over the course of an hour. This one probably won't sound nice after a certain speed, but perhaps if I can get it up above 150bpm, I will feel satisfied.

It goes like this: