his master’S voice

First things first, you are doing an amazing job – and that comes from a regular reader and subscriber since 1997! Thank you for providing insight into the realm of guitar as it is today. Now on to the topic. With all the tabs available on the internet and the online YouTube lessons, I have noticed that, basically, everything is transcribed wrong 99 per cent of the time. Back in the old days, I figured everything out by ear and it worked well, as I developed my own licks. But I was still playing the songs wrong, especially the tricky parts!

A couple of days ago, Dave Mustaine became so frustrated with all the poor transcriptions that he tweeted the intro of Holy Wars himself as a tab. To my surprise, I was playing the intro wrong – minimal changes, but still wrong. That made me think; how cool would it be if you were to persuade professional guitarists out there to transcribe 10 very cool and hard to grasp licks/riffs from their discography? Not the overplayed stuff, but the hidden gems that even hardcore fans would appreciate. Everybody knows Paranoid, but not everybody knows the amazing riff to Sato, right? Evangelos Boultoukas, via email A great point, Evangelos. While it’s great that there are so many resources to help guitarists learn licks, the MK1 eardrum is a remarkably powerful tool in its own right. And the act of focusing incredibly intently on a section of playing again and again – replacing the needle each time, if you’re doing it the old-school way – helps develop your ear in a way that videos just can’t do. But it would be great to get some legends to explain exactly how to play their finest riffs. We’ll make enquiries...