Malmsteen, Yngwie
02 YNGWIE MALMSTEEN
Yngwie talks his influences
“H ere are some pieces that are good to, maybe not learn, but certainly draw inspiration from. For instance, Nicola Paganini’s 24 Caprices – and the ones in particular are 5, 16 and 24.
Seriously, when you hear 5, you will think, ‘Oh fuck, Yngwie really ripped this shit off !’ Any piece of Bach’s music I listen to makes me feel miniscule... It’s so humbling. If I could bring any musician back from the dead, it would be him.”
04 PAUL GILBERT
Paul says… Look at intervals like colours
“L ately, I’ve been improvising and have found it’s really important to know the language of intervals, which is the relationship between each note. If you look at the pentatonic scale, it’s important to know how each one relates to your key centre. Find out where your 3rds are all over the neck; don’t think of them as ‘C’ or whatever – think of them as your minor 3rds. Those become your colours, and soon you’ll find there’s your blue, there’s your yellow and so on. Improvising is so important for creating melodies. It’s a bad habit for guitarists to simply just play scales in order; it’s much cooler to hear melodies with wider intervals.
“A good example of this would be The Beatles’ guitar solo on the song Birthday: the first two notes are a 5th apart. I would never have thought of that in a million years – guitar players naturally would go to the scale in order. It almost sounds like Ray Charles once you start connecting all the dots, so I’d say knowing your intervals is incredibly important.”
05 JOHN PETRUCCI
John’s ‘Hit and Miss’ philosophy: introducing the feeling of speed to your practice routine
J ohn has a clever way of building speed – he calls it his ‘Hit and Miss’ philosophy. The idea is that you play faster than you are really capable, and, rather than thinking about hitting each individual note, you think about generally keeping your hands in sync. As John says: “I wouldn’t recommend you do it all the time, but it’s a useful tool and you can gain a lot of speed from it.” Try applying John’s ‘Hit and Miss’ method to a favourite shreddy lick. Play for a couple of minutes atwarm-up pace, then finish off by blasting through your lick at high speed. Even though at first you’ll probably miss more notes than you hit, the point is to let your hands experience the ‘feeling’ of moving fast. At some point your hands will hopefully synchronise.
06
BUCKETHEAD
I t’s anyone’s guess why Axl’s choice to replace Slash was someone who could perfectly imitate an 8-bit video game, but it was guitar’s gain as this enigmatic maestro shot to prominence. After Vai, Morello, and Satriani, listeners could be forgiven for thinking they’d heard everything the guitar could do. Buckethead showed they were woefully mistaken. Some of his ideas are more novel than musical, but others, like his legato licks performed while barring harmonics with the picking hand, have real applications. The influence of his teacher Paul Gilbert is often visible, but Buckethead is among the last true innovators.
07 GUTHRIE GOVAN
A shred phenomenon he may be, but Guthrie prefers to wax lyrical about ‘feel’
“T he older, wiser player knows in an intuitive way that it’s the quality of the playing that counts. But if you are a beginner who’s looking to derive enough joy from the instrument so that you’re still pleased to see it the next time you practise, you need a mixture of those core values and things that are a little bit exotic or exciting. I think there’s a real value in learning the ‘forbidden mode’. When I was a kid, I didn’t actually care about soloing. Everything I did in those days was easy rhythm, lots of I-IV-V songs, for which I’m profoundly grateful, because if you are focusing on that type of music it’s not hard to play it, it’s only hard to play it well. Something I figured out a long time ago is this nebulous concept of ‘feel’ – how you play something; the dynamics, the timing and all the subtleties.”
The prolific shredder is as fast as they come
10 MICHAEL ANGELO BATIO
Three tips from the facemelting, double‑necked axe toting shred pioneer
1. Make your weak hand stronger
“A lot of people don’t know that I’m left-handed, though
I play right-handed guitar, but it actually worked out well for me for the first couple of years when I was learning, because I had to think of ways to make my weaker hand stronger with specific exercises. It wasn’t easy!”
2. Economy of motion
“What I still focus on, after all these years, is absolute economy of motion with my picking hand. I try to move it as little as possible from the elbow to avoid placing too much stress on my arm above the wrist. If you take care of those physical parts of your body you’ll find that it helps the rest of your technique, believe me. A lot of players don’t realise how crucial that focus is for the whole of your guitar playing.”
3. Try different genres
“I’m known for playing fast, and a lot of people expect very fast playing from me every time I play live. But I play in other styles too, and I’ll play them despite the pressure to just stick to fast playing. Right now I’m starting to learn a bit of bluegrass country picking because it’s a real challenge. A lot of shredders move away from rock and into jazz because the theory behind jazz is so much more challenging, but at the moment I’m enjoying the different sound and feel of country.”