Rocco Zifarelli Video Masterclass pt1
In the first instalment of this six-part video feature, Rocco Zifarelli demonstrates some smooth soloing over a fast-paced, blues fusion backing track. Jon Bishop is your guide.
This month we are delighted to welcome Italian fusion wizard, Rocco Zifarelli to take on various Jason Sidwell penned backing tracks over the next six issues. Rocco has been film composer legend Ennio Morricone’s guitarist for over 20 years and is a fabulously talented player.
We start with a slick sounding, fast-paced offering entitled Route 666. The tempo is a brisk 155bpm so it’s worth having a fretboard roadmap established prior to setting sail on such a freeform, improvised solo.
As Rocco explains, the track starts out in the key of G Minor. The standard approach is usually to employ G Minor Pentatonic blues and rock vocabulary. However, the backing track is more harmonically advanced than just that one key and requires various other scales and concepts to be used to navigate it effectively.
Luckily, Rocco meticulously talks us through the various options and demonstrates them in the video. To help you conceptualise these we have notated the demonstrated examples from Rocco’s chat (see Examples 1-12 after the main solo). By studying these you will be able to memorise the fingerings and scale shapes required. We have labelled the various sections with rehearsal marks A through to E.
Section A features the move from Gm7 to Gdim7. As Rocco explains, you will need to shift from G Minor Pentatonic to G Diminished harmony and he demonstrates three ways to do this via the G diminished 7 arpeggio, G diminished scale and G diminished patterns. You can also treat the G
A7b9 diminished 7 chord as an as they contain mostly the same notes. An easy way to
A7b9 outline the sound is to play D Harmonic Minor
Bb (D-E-F-G-A- -C#) as this contains the same notes as A Phrygian
Bb-
Dominant (A- C#-D-E-F-G). The B and C sections shift to the key of C and, as you’d by now expect, Rocco plays the modes or scales that fit each chord: C Major Pentatonic for C, F Lydian for F Major, and F Dorian for F
Bbm7b5 Eb
Minor. The and major 7 arpeggios are also demonstrated and notated.
Rocco also demonstrates the use of open voiced triads (referred to in the video as melodic triads).The D section is back to G Minor and the E section takes us to some arranged rhythmic hits.
This is quite a lot to remember, so memorising the whole solo would certainly be quite an undertaking. However, as usual, hopefully there will be new technique licks or phrases in here somewhere for you to perfect. If you find one you like then memorise it (and of course tweak and alter it as you see fit) so you can use it in future in your own solos.
And, as we also always say, once you have mastered some of the concepts in Rocco’s solo why not work on your own solo over Jason’s twisting blues fusion stomper? Have fun!
NEXT MONTH Rocco solos over Jason Sidwell’s smouldering groover, Harlem 72