ROCCO ZIFARELLI The Moonlight Marauder
For the fourth in this six-part series, Rocco demonstrates some phenomenal lead work over a fusion-style groove entitled The Moonlight Marauder, with Jon Bishop as your guide.
Ennio Morricone’s amazing guitarist blazes over a brand new track with full tutorial.
This month we welcome back Ennio Morricone’s incredible guitarist Rocco Zifarelli, to take on another Jason Sidwell penned track. It’s a slick fusion style offering called The Moonlight Maurader, designed to test Rocco’s inventiveness and technique to the limit. As you will see, once again our hero doesn’t disappoint!
The tempo is 135bpm so it’s good to have 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 B Minor and the standard approach for this type of harmony is to opt for B Dorian mode. B Dorian is built off the second degree of the A Major scale (B-C#-D-E-F#-G-A) but you can also view it as B Minor Pentatonic with added 6th and 9th (G and C#). The track is however rather more harmonically advanced than just the one key, and requires other scales and concepts to be employed so as to navigate it effectively.
Luckily, Rocco meticulously talks us through his chosen options and demonstrates them in the video. To help you conceptualise these we have notated 14 of the demonstrated examples from Rocco’s chat (see examples 1 to 14 after the solo’s transcription). By studying these you should be able to memorise the various fingerings and scale shapes required.
We have provided a chord sheet to further assist you, and help to inform you which of the harmonic choices goes where.
Rocco starts out by doubling the track’s central riff and also plays some funky 16th-note chords.
For the chorus and powerchord sections he switches between B Minor Pentatonic, B Blues scale and B Dorian mode to create his seamless, flowing lines.
In the tutorial chat Rocco also demonstrates other concepts such as double-note phrasing, inspired by listening to saxophone players like Michael Brecker. Other effective ideas that Rocco pulls out include unison double-note ideas and the stacking of notes in 4th intervals. The simultaneous combination of two Pentatonic positions is also exploited, along with string skipping. There is sus2 section too, that
Bb moves between G Major and Major scales.
It would be an incredibly daunting task to memorise Rocco’s entire solo. But as always when learning from great players, the best idea is to select licks or phrases that tweak one’s ear, and learn them first. Doing this can often unlock other areas of their style that may previously have looked impossible.
So, once you have mastered some of the concepts in Rocco’s solo why not blend some of his ideas with your own, to come up with a new solo over Jason’s bespoke rock fusion track. Good luck, and have fun!
NEXT MONTH Rocco solos over Jason’s Fortitude which is full of unique chord changes