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I’d like to talk a little bit about rock cliches. There are so many of them. I’ve chosen just a few to focus on. To start with, let’s take a loot at this little pattern popularized by Chuck Berry. All I’m doing is taking my first finger, playing up the fourth fret, or wherever you want to play it, and just slide up one fret. Alright, it’s two strings. I put them together and repeat pick, and I get this. Another Chuck Berry inspired cliche is the bending of the third string and playing the second string, trading off. There’s also the Dick Dale style surf slide, which is like this. Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t use cliches. You can do your own things with them. They’re actually quite handy. In fact, the Beatles used the Chuck Berry lick, this one. It’s the intro to a famous tune. Here’s another lick that became a bit of a cliche, and it’s a little bit of a combination of those two Chuck Berry licks. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin used to use this a lot, where he would bend the third string and do that lick, and then combine these two notes, and that gives you this great little cliche lick. You can descend the pentatonic scale with that. So that gives you a five note pattern, which is a great cliche.

Another thing is to bend that third string and pull it off into the fourth string, also popularized by Jimmy Page. Again, I’m not saying don’t play them. Do your own thing with them. Lenny Kravitz wrote a hit song based on that lick. You can guess which one it is. Finally, I want to look at Eddie Van Halen, somebody more modern. Now he created the three finger righthanded tapping lick, all over the first Van Halen albums, especially in the guitar solo of Eruption, but anytime you play that lick, it’s going to be so closely identified with Van Halen, so you have to be careful. But, you should know how to play the lick because it’s a cool lick and you can have fun with it, and you may be able to come up with your own thing with it. So here it is, the Van Halen cliche. I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson on rock cliches.

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Hi, my name is Alex Skolnick. I’ve been playing the guitar since I was ten years old. When I was in high school, I joined a band of guys in their 20s called Legacy. We recorded our first album when I was 18 and changed our name to Testament. I spent the next five years on tour with groups such as Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, Judas Priest, White Zombie, and Iron Maiden. I got a lot of great reviews in guitar magazines and started showing up in reader’s polls often as best thrash guitarist.

When I was 19 years old I developed an interest in jazz guitar and world music. This had a profound effect on my development as a musician and a guitarist. At 20 I got hired to write a guitar instruction column for Guitar World Magazine. I was the first thrash guitarist ever to do so. In the early 90s I left the band to pursue other musical interests. I recorded an album with the progressive metal band Sabotage. I played with Ozzy Osbourne. I was one of only ten guitarists ever to do so. I moved to New York in the late 90s to really pursue jazz full time. I got a degree from the New School University jazz program. I released my first jazz album, Goodbye to Romance, and it got great reviews in Downbeat, JAZZIZ, and a lot of other magazines. I’ve recently released my fourth jazz album, Veritas, which reached the top of the iTunes jazz charts, the top ten.

In 2005, I rejoined Testament and our reunion launched the band back to the big leagues. We did our highest charting album ever, called the Formation of Damnation. That received a Golden God Award. And we’ve since rejoined a lot of the bands we used to tour with. We’re about to do a second album, a reunion album. It’s called Dark Roots of Earth. I’m about to release a memoir. You can follow me on Twitter or on my website, www.alexskolnick.com.

I hope you enjoy my Howcast series on How to Play Heavy Metal Guitar.

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How do we get into two octaves? Well, let’s start where we are here at the fifth fret. We keep going down and we just play scale tones. It actually looks like an A minor bar chord. Alright?

So from there I can sweep. Alright? And this gives me a nice two octave sweep. A little more distortion. Okay? What if I go to that next one and keep going down the scale tones? Now that’s a great one. That one’s pretty easy to finger. I can add to that and play from here, first finger seventh fret. That’s a nice little sweep. From here, I can play from there. Alright?

So it’s always the same notes. These are only, even though you’re hearing a lot of notes, it’s really just three tones. It’s just A, C, and E. So here I’m starting at E, and then A, C, E, A, C, E. Alright.

So now I’m going to crank up the distortion and show you these a little bit faster. Okay. Take your time before going that fast.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson on sweeping.

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For this lesson, I’d like to focus on right hand fretting. I’ve looked at a couple other two-handed licks in the other Howcast videos. For this lesson, I want to focus specifically on a lick where you’re playing multiple notes on one string.

So I’m on the E string, the first string. I’m going to tap with this hand 7th fret, 12th fret. So then the right hand fretting happens here. Alright? So when I get to the top, I’m pulling the note off to get back to the 12th fret. Alright? So when I do that at full volume and full speed it sounds like this.

And now to give it some variety, I’m going to move the right hand around. So what you just heard was on the 15th fret, but I’m actually going to move to the 14th fret, back to the 15th fret, up to the 17th fret. Check it out. Alright?

Now, the right hand fretting is busy. Alright? So I can’t really do much more with that except keep moving it. But if I keep that pattern going with the right hand, I can then move my left hand index finger and that changes it up a little bit. Check it out.

Like all other fast licks, remember to start out by going slow. I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson on right hand fretting.

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Let’s talk about cross string picking mechanics. I have to confess this is not a term I use very often, but I know a lot of players do use it, and I’ve learned a lot of licks and have come up with a lot of licks that I suppose apply to the concept of cross string picking mechanics.

So what I wanted to do now is look at a pattern using the low two strings of the guitar, the fifth and sixth strings. If I just played the first four notes of the A natural minor scale, I think the best way to play in that position is alternate picking, alright. Down, up, down, up. So when I cross the string, check it out. Alright, it’s a down motion and an up motion, and I can make that snappy. Alright.

And you want as little motion as possible in order to make it the most effective. So when you play it fast, I can play up and down. Okay. Now it’s kind of interesting, if I swap positions, if I play the exact same notes but start on the fourth finger, I get this and for some reason here it feels better to pick in the same direction for the first two notes. So here I would start on a down stroke and play the next string on a down stroke. It has a slightly different flavor. Listen to the difference.

Alright. So the alternate picking is a little more cultist. If I descend, to me it sounds best to do the first two notes on the fifth string than the other notes here, and I once again return to alternate picking. How you prefer to cross string mechanics really depends on what position you’re in, your left hand frets, and the lick itself.

Let’s go back to the first one, all other picking. Now I’m going to move that up and down the neck. Here’s that same lick an octave higher. The picking is the same, it feels a little different because I’m on the highest ones.

Back to the second position. Here I’m starting on the picking in the same direction. If I do that up here… So again it’s really important to practice all of these slowly before you play them at that speed.

Have fun with cross string picking mechanics.

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Vibrato. Anytime you have a note and you hold it for a little while, it sounds nice to give it a little bit of vibration. It’s a lot like singing. So if somebody sings a note, you don’t want them to vibrate it right away otherwise it sounds funny. Right? But if you hold the note, then add vibrato, it’s much better.

The same thing is true of guitar. So I’m going to take a note here and I’m going to give it a little bit of vibrato after I’ve held it for a second. Okay? Same thing can be done with a bend. It’s a little trickier, but here’s an example.

So what I try to be able to do is vibrate it with different tempos. If I’m playing to a tempo like this, I’m actually thinking of triplets there. One two three, one two three, one two three, one two three, one two three, one two three. I might try eighth notes, sixteenth notes. These are all good exercises for practicing vibrato. But ultimately, it should come really naturally and it should happen after you’ve held the note.

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Alright. Let’s sort of talk about sweep picking. That’s something a lot of people want to know about. I think it’s something best delved into slowly. I can show you the concept of it without even fretting any notes. It’s really with the right hand where you go across the strings in one direction and you create the sound. It’s up and down.

Now, the trick is getting your left hand to match up with that. This is why I often think it’s better to start with just two or three strings. A sweep on two strings might be something like. Alright. On the same direction. Alright. It’s very simple. It’s just A into C.

Now I’m going to add a third note, the E. Alright. So, each time I hit a note I’m muting the note that came before. In slow motion it’s that. But it’s really. Okay.

Very slowly I’m going to add notes to this. Now let’s add a root on top. Okay. So I’m picking down strokes, and then an up stroke. So this is an A minor arpeggio.

Now from there I could pull-off. And go back down. So I’m taking the high note, pulling off, and sweeping back down. It’s almost like in The Wizard of Oz – follow the yellow brick road. Alright.

What if I move this to the next inversion of the triad? Well, I can do this. Okay. So here I’m just putting the root in the middle. So I’m starting on an E. Alright. And that makes a nice little one octave sweep, too.

Now, you noticed I’m not playing with too much distortion yet. I think for practicing these it’s really important to stick with a tone that’s maybe not entirely clean but not too distorted. Enough so that you can hear the sound but you’re not fighting the noise. Make it clean with this type of sound before you get into a real distorted sound.

Okay. So we have this octave, this octave, and now we’re going to go down to the fifth fret and play this one. This one’s a little trickier because it’s just one finger moving at the fifth fret. Okay.

Okay. So that covers A minor. And that’s the one we just did up an octave. Alright. So, these are simple sweeps.

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Another type of tapping that was also popularized by Van Halen was harmonic tapping. With this type of tapping you take any chord, go 12 frets higher. So, for example, here I am. Here’s an E minor chord. 12 frets higher, I have the same notes up here. Now, if I just move to the right of each note and tap over the metal part of the fret while I’m fingering the chord I get this pretty cool pattern. Check it out.

So all I’m doing is taking this finger, the middle finger, and tapping 12 frets higher from whatever note I’m playing on the metal part of the fret. Okay? One more lick involving two handed tapping. Let’s take one string. Let’s take the first string. Let’s tap with the right hand at the 12th fret. Let’s get the open string. Alright? So we’re hammering on and pulling off with the right hand finger, but in between let’s play at the 5th fret and the 7th. Alright? That’s a nice little pattern. I can play that on any string.

That’s it! I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson two handed tapping.

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Alright. Legato techniques were popularized in the 1980’s by Eddie Van Halen. The basic idea is that you’re taking a note off of the first note you play, you can pick a note, and then hammer-on and pull-off and get a whole flurry of other notes. Say I’m at the fifth fret. My A natural minor scale is this. If I ascend I get this. So, you understand, I’m just ascending and descending.

Now, if I take those first three notes and instead of picking I hammer-on and pull-off, alright, that’s the beginning of a legator pattern. If I continue down the scale I don’t need to pick the next string because my hand is coming and hammering-on. The hammer-on is the source of the sound.

I can do the same thing on the next string. Alright. So when it’s quick it sounds like that. Any note I land on I can take that note and do the same pattern. So, here I’m going to do the same pattern with this B.

A good way to practice these is not necessarily to start out going across the neck. Just like we started that lick on one string and then two strings, try practicing it on one string. If I do two strings.

What if I want to ascend through the scale? Ascending is a little trickier, but I can do it by sliding and picking. So, when you ascend you have to pick each new string.

This is pretty advanced stuff. You might not want to start out with this if you’re new to the guitar. Make sure you go slow, and try not to do everything at once. Try to do one or two strings at a time, and pace yourself.

Thank you for checking out this lesson on legato playing.

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Two handed tapping was popularized initially by Eddie Van Halen, who caught on, and was used by a lot of different guitar players, including yours truly. I try not to use it too much, because it has become somewhat of a cliché, but you can do some really cool stuff with it.

I want to start by looking at a lick loosely based on a piece by a former teacher of mine, Joe Satriani. And this type of lick involves playing a power chord. Right? So it’s all tapped. So with my left hand, I’m tapping the bottom two notes. I’m doing the same thing, but just reversed, an octave higher. So everything is tapped.

The lick from Eddie Van Halen’s, “Eruption,” which is basically taking a triad and hammering on all the notes, and then pulling off with the right hand.

So once you’re doing that, you have a lot of possibilities. You can shift your whole hand to the left. See what happens.

I can lower the bottom note.

And now I can lower the top. You know you can do any sort of pattern with it.

So I’m going to play what I just played, with full volume.

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[music]

I want to talk to you about lead guitar melodic licks. It’s a pretty broad term. It can apply to a lot of things, but generally what comes to mind for me is something that doesn’t stick with the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic is great for licks. It’s great for flash. It’s great for certain limited patterns, but it doesn’t have that much melody. E-minor pentatonic, for example, would be this. [music]

It’s only five notes. Not a lot of melody you can get out of that. To make it more melodic, I would certainly add in the notes of the natural minor scale, which would give you this. [music]

If I’m playing a solo, and I want it to be particularly melodic, I’ll definitely emphasize those notes. So what are the minor notes, the modal notes? F-sharp, and C. F-sharp, C. F-sharp, C. Everywhere you have those notes, try to throw those in.

Let me play some licks right now. This is just purely pentatonic. I don’t consider this melodic. Not that it’s bad, but it’s not melodic. [music]

So now I’m going to play a little thing, and I’m going to try to make it more melodic. I’m going to throw in some of those notes from the natural minor scale. [music]

There should be a big difference, in terms of which one’s melodic, and which one’s not. To be more melodic, play modal notes. That’s the point of this lesson on melodic heavy metal licks.

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Shredding techniques, it’s a very broad term, and there are other videos that I’ve done for Halcast where you can see me talk about speed picking, contour sequences and stuff like that. And that all applies to shredding. But what I’d like to do right now is take bits and pieces of that and show you how I might combine that into a shred solo. Let’s pick a key, let’s say I’m gonna be in E minor, so I have my pentatonic scale, I have my seven note natural liner scale, and I might combine some sequences where I do four notes at a time, I might do some hammer-ons and pull-offs with the pentatonics.

I might do some mandolin or world music influence picking, you know where I pick really fast. So here I’m going to do a combination of those things.

Okay, so one thing I might do if I needed to play in a shredding situation is to take a pattern and do variations on it and move it around. if I take the first two strings and play a four note pattern, maybe I could change one note. Then I might let it breathe for a bit and play some bending. I might throw some sweep picking in there. So shredding is really just a combination of whatever licks you know, pretty much as fast as you can play them without losing control, and trying to sneak in some slow, melodic parts here and there to let it breathe. I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson on shredding techniques.

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Let’s talk about alternate picking and 16th notes. One of the simplest ways to play this is just on an open string as a rhythm, either the E string or the A string. Or.
And you’ll often hear that with chords thrown in. But either way, you have to be very careful with the right hand. Make sure you’re always playing up and down. And it gets a little trickier when you start dealing with the scales. So as a simple exercise, here are the first five notes of an A natural minor scale, also known as A Aeolian mode. Just five notes – one, two, three, four, five. Okay? So notice how I’m starting with a down stroke, then an up stroke, down.

Now here’s the crucial part. I’m switching from the 6th string to the 5th string and I’m doing down stroke and an up stroke. There may be a temptation to do a down stroke, and it’s not that you couldn’t do the same stroke in a row but it gets a special sound with alternate picking. So, one, two, three, four. And now I’m going to go down the scale as well, so up and down this five note pattern. Now notice when I descend the pattern I’m starting on a down stroke as well, and I’m ending on an up stroke. So, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

I’m using my thumb and my index finger. I’m keeping the pick very close to the strings. People use different picking positions. I’m also using my fourth finger to anchor the hand here.

I would recommend practicing this slow and working your way up. So if the tempo is this, these are the 16th notes. Once you have that down you can practice all the way up or down the scale, or try different patterns. Here’s another pattern using A Aeolian and all alternate picking 16th notes.

And there you have it. Have some fun with alternate picking and 16th notes.

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Okay. I want to talk to you about string skipping arpeggios. A common way to play arpeggios is just taking triads and linking them. In a sweep picking arpeggio, you might do something like this. Okay, and I have another lesson on sweep picked arpeggios. And that gives you options, like this.

That’s very cool, but you have other options if you do a string skipped arpeggio. Say I only want to go up to C on the 8th fret. That might be difficult here, but if I move to the second finger, and I play two notes on the next string, on the fourth string, but then I skip the string, that’s the idea here, skip to the tenth fret. So, now I’m going to emphasis more hammer ons and pull offs. Alright. So I can’t really do that here. I could, but it doesn’t feel the same. I could move that to G major. Alright, so same thing. Two string triad, skipping the second string. You could move it to F, then E, E major. Alright, so if I play those together.

There you have it. Again, those could be done all over the neck. And that’s just a starter example. Go slow, and have fun with string skipping arpeggios.

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Alright. I’d like to talk to you very quickly about using the bar, sometimes called the whammy bar, sometimes called the vibrato bar. And it’s something that’s overdone a lot, so you have to be careful with it. I actually stopped using it very early on in my career. But, it’s fun to play around with it once in a while, and if you’re checking out the styles of guitar players like Jeff Beck, or Dave Gilmour, it’s an integral part of their playing. So what they’ll often do is play melodies, and take a note and just enhance it with the bar. Something like.

So there you can really hear the vibrato, that definitely gives it a vibrato bar feel, makes it kind of anthemic. Jimi Hendrix took the bar to whole new places. He would do a lot of stuff with feedback and harmonics. So an example of that is, if we take the natural harmonics, say on the 7th fret, I can play with the bar, and it’s going to make a really cool sound. Check it out.

So that also has to do with the amp feeding back. I’m going to just do a couple more examples, and listen to how the amp feeds back, and listen to how I take the feedback and use the bar to enhance it. And let’s see where it goes.

Alright, that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson on the vibrato bar and the whammy bar.

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Speed exercises.

Okay, one of the most important things to keep in mind for speed picking is that you have to start out slow. One of the things I liked to do when I was learning was take a pattern, maybe a four note pattern where I had to switch strings, for example.

Alright, these are four notes. And I would play to a metronome, and just repeat that. And getting it faster.
Maybe I’ll move it up the scale.

OK. So there’s a lot of notes there, but all that is is basically this four note pattern. Then I started moving it up the neck. When I got up here by the twelve fret I started changing strings.

Now, there’s a lot of cool speed licks that aren’t picked. Or, they’re picked in the beginning, and then the rest of it is either legato or hammer-ons and pull-offs. As an example, here’s the first five notes of A major. I could start with the third note, hammer-on, and then pull-off.

It sounds simple enough. When I play it fast it makes a great little fast lick. I can even go to the next string. But as I’m only picking that first note, I’m being very careful with this hand to mute it so it’s not too noisy.

This is a six note pattern.

There you have it. Have some fun with speed picking.

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Hi, I’d like to talk to you about the major arpeggio. There are major arpeggios in all keys. We’re going to be looking at A major. There are variations on the arpeggio, but the basic arpeggio form is just the root, third, and fifth. If we take the root, third, and fifth of the A major scale, we get this. Alright. The scale itself is this.

Okay? So listen to how the notes just consist of the root, third, and fifth. That alone is called the triad. If we combine that with the next triad, an octave higher, we get a nice little two octave arpeggio. Okay? I can play this as a sweep, and it sounds like this. Another option is to start this on the 12th fret, the first finger. So now if I play these notes, I finger them like this.

And now I can play an A up an octave. So that makes a nice little sweep pattern, for an A major arpeggio. If I put those together

I can also play at the 5th fret, and this almost looks like an A major chord. It makes a nice sweep. If I put all of those together.

One more option is to start this one from here, the 7th fret.

So you have these all over the neck, but this is a good place to start for learning the A major arpeggio. I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson.

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Let’s talk about speed picking. There are a lot of different ways to speed pick. I started speed picking by listening to music from different cultures. For example, Italian mandolin, Flamenco guitar, Greek bouzouki, you know, many others. I often find that that’s the best source of speed picking. Just to take the mandolin example. Take one note and just practice playing that note up and down until you’re eventually able to play it almost like a fan. So it’s to be very relaxed.

You can change notes. You might combine this with hammer-ons and pull-offs. So there I worked my way down the scale. If I play more notes on the scale, say I play two scale notes up, and slide down, it creates a nice speed picking exercise.

I’m playing clean right now, but if I play this with full on distortion, it sounds pretty cool. Check it out.

Okay. So at the end I went down the scale across the strings. Again, you have to start slowly and you just need to practice like this and then eventually you get to the point where it’s like this, and you can add extra notes.

And there’s your little lesson on speed picking.

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Guitar soloing tips. I usually like to play ideas that are memorable and that you can sing along to. I don’t want it just to be a barrage of speed and flashiness. You can throw in speed and flashiness but it should be used tastefully. I think the most important thing is a melody.

So I try to think of some phrase that I can riff around with and maybe in between I’ll throw in some flashy notes. For example, if I’m playing in F sharp minor, I might start out with a bend. You know. There’s a lot of things I could do but let’s just say I started out with a bent. For my next lick maybe I’ll lead up to it with a fast lick. Then the next time around I’ll start picking it up. Maybe I could throw in some fast stuff like. But it always has to resolve to a melody. You can’t, it has to go somewhere. So if you’re going to play something fast make sure that it resolve to a melody.

I have a little riff looped up here that I’m going to play along to just so you can hear what I’m talking about. So that’s a very short solo, that’s a very quick example. But you can see I didn’t try to play over the whole thing. I left a lot of space. I tried to have some melodic ideas. I spiced up the melodic ideas with fast stuff but the fast stuff didn’t defined what I was playing.

So you really want to go for melody and memorability first and then all the other stuff goes in between.

I hope you have enjoyed these brief soloing tips.

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Pinched harmonics. Whenever I think of pinched harmonics the first person I think of is Billy Gibbons the guitarist for ZZ Top. A lot of other great players have made nice use of pinched harmonics as well. One of the things to keep in mind is that there are harmonics five, seven, and twelve frets away from every note as well as in other positions. For more details, I did do another Howcast lesson on harmonics, so you should check that out.

Let’s look at the position of the second fret, F sharp minor. My clearest harmonics here are twelve frets away. That’s the fourteenth fret. So, just for demonstration, I’m going to use my first finger and I’m going to pick each harmonic. If I were to tap those it would sound like this.

Okay. So, these aren’t good for pinched harmonics because it’s very hard to pick up here. What I want to do is go twelve frets higher, right. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve. Now, here I start to run out of room. So, I have to use the pick-up or the body of the guitar to memorize where I am. Now, using pinching technique I can find the harmonics. So, I’m just picking the note. As I pick the note my thumb is supposed to go over the harmonic. Now, I have to find this. No. There we go. Okay.

So this is easy to remember because on this guitar it’s pretty much right in the line of the pick-up. On another guitar it might be above the screw of the pick-up, and it’s going to be in a different place for each key. A big part of this is memorizing where the harmonics are on the guitar. But since I know where the main harmonic is for F sharp I can figure out where the rest of the notes are. Alright, it’s rough, but basically that’s this pentatonic and harmonics.

When playing pinched harmonics it really helps to be on the treble pick-up. It helps to have a lot of distortion, too. I can continue through the scale and play harmonics. Okay.

Having mapped out the harmonics I can now play some licks and just throw in pinched harmonics here and there. Check it out.

So, with pinched harmonics you sort of have to guess where they are. You’re not going to nail them every time, but when you do nail them they sound cool.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson on pinched harmonics.

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Changing keys. There are many keys to change to. If you’re playing in one key and suddenly it switches, a couple of things you have to keep in mind. One of the most important things to do is search for common notes. Most keys have at least a couple of notes in common. You can use these notes as anchors.

As an example I’m going to look at E minor and C minor, two very different keys. They do have a couple of notes in common, however. So, if I play an E minor chord, alright. I can play a D, right. That’s the seventh note of the scale. Suddenly the key switches to C minor. Well, I can still use my D, except now it’s the second note of the scale or the ninth.

OK. Same thing with G, right. Here’s a G. So, if I play over E minor this G is the third note of the scale. One two three, alright. So I’m going to use that, play a phrase based on that.

Then all of the sudden they trip me up. They switch to C minor. But I’m not worried, because G works for C minor. It’s the fifth of C minor. One two three four five. OK. So, I might switch from a phrase using G and E minor to a phrase in C minor. And since I have both of these notes, D and G, as common tones I can really use those as anchors. Now I’m going to play a little bit over E minor to C minor, and notice how I navigate the change.

Now, before you change keys it’s really important to learn the scales of whatever keys you’re playing over. In this case I’m playing over E minor and C minor. The only way to get around learning the scales is just to stick with the common tones. But in this case you would only have two notes. Then again you could play a decent solo with two notes, perhaps. But to really make things interesting learn the scales and learn the common tones.

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Let’s talk about sixteenth note triplets. First of all, what is a triplet? Well, a triplet is the division of a beat into three parts. So, if you have any tempo, we can take each beat and divide it into three parts. So, let’s say I have this tempo. All right, one, two, three, four. If I divide each one of those into three parts, that’s going to be a triplet.

Now, those are quarter notes. Any time you divide into triplets, the smaller numerical value is going to apply to them. For example, if you’re playing half notes, and you divide those into triplets, the triplets would be called quarter note triplets. If you have quarter notes, and you divide them into triplets, they’re eighth note triplets. If you divide eighth notes into triplets, those are called sixteenth note triplets. And so on, and so forth.

Here we have quarter notes. So if I divide quarter notes into triplets, I get this. Now, if I play that twice as fast, I get eighth note triplets. So, if I apply that to the scale, I could do the pentatonic scale. Once again.

So, that’s just one example. Of course, you could do triplets with any type of scale. What I did there, was I went down three strings, one, two, three, and then two, three, four, and then the next ones. O.K., I could also do a cool little pattern of sixteenth note triplets on just two strings. Say I’m here, same note from the pentatonic scale, and I go down the pentatonic scale, and I go back up, one, two, three, one, two, three. All right, here’s what that sounds like over the tempo.

Next position.

There you have it. Just a few things you can do with sixteenth note triplets.

Transcript

Natural harmonics.

The three main positions for natural harmonics are at the fifth, seventh, and twelfth fret. Every string has a harmonic at the fifth fret, the seventh fret, and the twelfth fret. You’ve probably heard these in the intros to songs by Yes, Metallica, and many others. There are a lot of possibilities of patterns that you can play with these.

One cool thing you can do is alternate strings. So, what if I play the low string at the seventh fret, skip a string, then move to the twelfth fret and play the fourth string. Alright. You could do the same thing on the next set of strings. It creates a very harp-like effect. If I play those together I get this. If I play that all the way across the neck I get this. Sounds pretty cool. It can also go from this note to the next note seventh fret, the next note fifth fret, third string.

And those are just the main positions. You also have these hidden positions. You have harmonics on the fourth fret. They’re a little harder to squeeze out, but you can get some cool sounds from that. And the third fret. Here’s a little pattern using harmonics of the third fret and fifth fret. That’s from a tune of mine called Path of Least Resistance.

Now, in addition to all these positions that we’ve just looked at we can go above the twelfth fret, and we have harmonics here at the seventeenth fret. A little harder to squeeze out, but they’re there. And then the nineteenth fret. Those are the same as the seventh fret.

So, as you can see, harmonics can be found all over the neck. Be sure to have some fun with them, and check out some of the other lessons here that I’ve done on harmonics.

Transcript

Okay, improvisation and phrasing, much can be said about it, we could probably talk about it for hours. This is only going to be a few minutes, so I’m just going to focus on taking a pattern and just changing a note around.

So for example, here’s an E minor triad, right, I may take that pattern and come up with something based on that, OK, so there’s a little melodic pattern right there to improvise, and use it as a phrase. There’s a number of things I could do, I could change the last note, alright, so right there I have a nice little pattern.

I could change the first note, I could change a note in the middle, I could add notes, I could subtract notes, I could change the placing of the rhythm. So I’m going to play right now and try to demonstrate doing all of those things just using these few notes in this little position. Okay, so all those phrases came from three strings, one octave position, I’m not moving all around the neck yet, I could of course, but it’s better to start in just a small position and see how many phrases you can get out of that before traveling up and down the neck doing different positions.

Remember the key is variation, so just take a pattern, change a note at the beginning, change a note at the end, change a note at the middle, have fun and experiment. And that’s our lesson on phrasing and improvisation.