Rock Guitar Greatest Hits Vol. 2

Lesson Source: Angus Clark's Hard Rock Survival Guide Lead

Let's move to B minor shall we? Randy Rhoads left an indelible mark on hard rock guitar with the two albums he made with Ozzy Osbourne. He had a lot of great tools in his kit. Badass pentatonics, tapping, position scales, three note per string patterns. And a flair for composition. I'm taking a kitchen-sink approach to combining elements of Randy's style into one solo. One thing I've always found interesting is the true takeaways of any one player's style reveal themselves more when they appear imitated in someone else's playing.

This is an extended solo form. It starts with a one chord groove and then breaks into a more classically inspired chord progression, then there's a couple of stop time figures, and then a BIG FINISH! So your solo map is already marked out by the rhythm section, you just have to fill in the blanks. This kind of orchestration is indicative of Hard Rock songs from almost every decade, Deep Purple, Ozzy, Sabbath, Rainbow, Avenged Sevenfold, Stone Sour, etc. It's about creating a song within a song, a real showcase for the featured instrumentalist in the band to have a whack. Don't expect to do this on every song.

Lesson Source: Angus Clark's Hard Rock Survival Guide Lead

B minor, so I start in the 7th position with some straight up blues-y pentatonic stuff. Nothing real surprising. A couple of pinch harmonics. The ascending pattern is a fun one to get into your playing, it's a pattern of six notes played in a rhythmic grouping of 4, if you get into playing this run make sure you get your sixteenth note feel locked in with the rhythm section. You've got to have some swagger on this kind of stuff.

The tapping section is again demanding rhythmically, particularly at this tempo, and is complicated by the fact that the drums are playing sixteenths on the kick drum while you're playing triplets. Stay in time. Coming into the stop time figures we're in a position scale fingering and I'm using pull-offs to create a fluid sound. Again, it's on the soloist to stay in time, you're playing over just a hihat at points. Relax, and listen while you play, that's the key to staying in time. Remember to breathe.

The two runs that close the solo are both demanding for different reasons, and are both examples of "here to there" problem solving. The ascending run is sixteenth note triplets, and I double back a couple of times in order to nail the high B on a strong beat. This run is mostly legato, so it'll be a test of your finger strength (or your guitar's set up and your compressor settings) to make the entire run speak clearly. On that high B I manage to let a little vibrato creep in before having to play the closing run, which is a fairly straightforward pattern run, it just ends very neatly and needs to be playing in time and with conviction in order for it to sound cool.

Lesson Source: Andy Timmons's Electric Expression

In the next performance section we're talking about Cry For You. This is the end section of the song, and this is the one that usually goes on for a while when I'm playing it in concert. It's just D minor to B flat major 7. So we're going to illuminate a few things in here. One of the things is how I'm using mostly the D minor pentatonic, but I'm adding the ninth, so it's a penatonic +1. Sexatonic if that's a word. I'm not really sure. And I'm illuminating some things like motivic development, which is something I'm very fond of. Playing a melodic idea and developing it from there. And there's some two-note clusters that I'm playing, some scalar clusters for lack of a better term. And some bending ideas, some horizontal ideas, as always and some voice leading. And a couple of cool bending Hendrix-y things. Hopefully it's a nice musical piece and will help you create your own.

Lesson Source: Andy Timmons's Electric Expression

This performance is over the progression in the end of my tune Cry For You.

Lesson Source: Andy Timmons's Electric Expression

That's a little bit of improvising on the chord changes to the end of Cry For You and it's just repeating D minor to B flat over and over. And, so I improvised something. Now I've analyzed it and I'm going to break it down for you. I started off with something we talked about called motivic development. I made a melodic statement and then I figured out a way of reincorporating that statement in some way to give the listener something to grab on to. It's just a simple little phrase but I really like how it laid over that chord. I'm starting on that ninth, which the melody features, but I went to a higher place with it. I slid up to that G. This whole melody's happening only on the G string. It's completely horizontal. Again, underscoring how much I do that and how much I love the sound of how vocal that can be. I got all the way to that A and then I wanted to get back because by then the B flat major 7 chord is happening, so that D, the root of the key, is also the third of that B flat. And the top note, the A natural, is that major seven which is a really beautiful tone. It just happens to be two notes you're naturally going to play even if you're just sticking to the minor pentatonic. So that's blending together motivic development, some horizontal playing. Let me also point out that I'm utilizing mostly the minor pentatonic and I'm adding the ninth scale degree. I'm avoiding the sixth scale degree because that B flat doesn't necessarily sound good to me over the D minor, or even the B flat chord. It's just not a note that I gravitate towards.

So, if we have a pentatonic scale and we add a note, I guess it's a sexatonic. I'm not really sure if that's the proper terminology folks. That's what we're calling it. It's basically the minor pentatonic with one extra note, so you've got a six note grouping. I went from the fifth to the seventh, I avoided the sixth. Those are the notes that sound best to me, and my favorite melodic choices over these two chords. I did another hybrid picking bend where I'm using my middle finger gripping underneath the high E string pretty stiffly. You can hear how I'm slapping the string on the fretboard. Again, something that Albert King and Stevie Ray employed quite a bit. When I'm playing it on the track listen to how I'm interacting with what Simon's doing on the drums. He's got a certain rhythmic figure playing, and I'm playing in the spaces between it. It happened naturally. I've heard the track before, but I'm reacting to what he's doing. And that's part of improvisational development, it's not just playing what you know and what you hear. You need to be reacting to what's going on around you, whatever the voicing is that somebody's playing on the guitar, the keyboards, or something the bass player may be doing. Or a rhythmic figure the drummer is doing. Instinctually you will develop that sense of what's appropriate at the time. What might sound cool with that. What do I feel naturally to do with what's going on. And that's a part of your ear training and development. He got that rhythmic figure going and I just played in the spaces around it, and I thought it sounded cool.

Right after that there's another little melodic technique I use a lot, and it involves sliding into a note. In this case the E natural over the D minor. And then grabbing the note above it that is the next consecutive scale tone, so it's a major or minor second note cluster basically. And it's because the notes are sounding at the same time, where normally it can sound a little disonant, but if it's used in a phrase where there's motion happening it's effective. Basically I like it because of the tension that it creates. Here's an exception I'm making on that B flat note that I mentioned I was omitting earlier. It can make a nice tension tone leading from the D minor to the B flat. In this case, I slid from the G to the A, then grabbed that B flat note. If I just played the note straight on the string that's got a vibe and a melodic shape. So I'm playing the A, grabbing the B flat, rearticulating the A. I can even resolve it like that. That's a pretty sound too. That's the beauty of any time you learn a little nugget of something, and I consider this a nugget, and I'm learning something from it too because I haven't isolated it like that before, but I enjoy that exploration. Once you've gotten that little piece of information, see where else you can plug it in. You can do it with bending too. I was just sliding the note, but you can do it with bending too. That's a nice little cluster, because you get interesting harmonic content because you hear the raising and lowering of the lower harmonic. That's great. It's a contrapuntal motion within its own line.

So that's another cool little technique, you can make an exercise out of it. And I'll do that a lot as well. I'll use that minor second, major second note cluster and I'll ascend through the scale like that. Let's go through the D aeolian scale and see what we find. It's a nice way to build excitement and build the tension. After I did those double stops I got into a rhythmic feel, and this is something that I do a lot, in addition to just feeling where the quarter note and eighth notes are. I got into a very lengthy triplet feel. I do play a lot of triplets, and some of it comes from having played a lot of jazz and swing feel music. I really like that feel of superimposing the triplet. And I believe that's how I ended the phrase, in some kind of ascending and then got into some Jimi Hendrix. That's one of my favorite licks, where I'm bending up to the unison, then pulling down on the B string. Those are some of the techniques I'm using on Cry For You, so explore some of the possibilities.

Lesson Source: James Hogan's 50 All Purpose Pentatonic Licks

Lick #15 “M.S.G.” is in the style legendary Scorpions, U.F.O. and M.S.G guitarist Michael Schenker.
It’s based in Position V of A minor pentatonic and sounds great over an A minor hard rock groove. Again, keep in mind that these licks can be easily transposed to different keys! If you want to play the lick in G minor move it down two frets. If you want it in C minor pentatonic move it up 1 1/2 steps, to position V of C minor pentatonic, etc. You’ll hear this type of lick a lot in Schenker’s playing. Enjoy!