Transcription
Today I like to show you five exercises from the masters of shred guitar. These exercises are perfect for learning how to play and create fast and exciting licks. These patterns will show you how it's done so you can do it yourself. Let's jump right into it.
[Applause]
This first exercise is from Paul Gilbert's instructional video called Intense Rock 2. It's a great instructional video, try to get a copy. You will learn a lot from it, and it's basically one pattern that gets repeated in different octaves of the scale. The only difference in this exercise is the first string that has a different picking pattern, but then it repeats the same pattern. Then, so what he's basically doing here is playing just one pattern that he repeats all over the scale. So he creates this longer picking run that sounds great, but it's just the same pattern. What you have to do here is learn and and memorize that pattern and repeat it in different places. So the pattern would be this one with minor changes depending on what section of the scale you are. So check on the tabs and find the different patterns all over the different places of the neck and practice them individually.
[Applause]
If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the Bell icon so you never miss an [Applause] update.
This second exercise by Marty Friedman from his Melodic Metal Guitar, another great instructional, it's basically the same concept. It's one pattern that gets repeated in different places of the [Applause] neck. So let's isolate this pattern. What he does is to connect them with the slide that creates that moving effect. You can also go up, it would change the pattern, but it's a it's a cool variation. So just do that. Learn this pattern and connect it in different places of the scale to incorporate it into your own playing.
[Music]
[Applause]
The amount of stuff that I learned from these instructional videos, it's it's great. This one's from Richie Kotzen's instructional videos called Rock Chops and this is a C major scale legato exercise. This is the pattern and he repeats it all over the scale. That's the ascending portion of the of the exercise. Then comes the descending portion that is something like this. So we have two patterns here, the ascending one, we connect it with the slide and then comes the second pattern which is this one. So a lot of stuff from the shred guitar, it's about patterns, learning patterns and how to connect them. This is a great way to learn this style. It doesn't mean that you have to play patterns all the time because it's boring and it's not so musical, but in order to learn how this all these super fast and and and long runs and and picking runs and legato runs and sweep picking uh sequences happen, if you analyze them, it's that it's patterns that are are put all of them together. This Jason Becker lick shows you how complex these patterns can get. This one in particular mixes picking, legato techniques, and it's a great example of a less used pattern and repetition lick. You see how complex this pattern can get. It's not just like doing something like this. So try it in different positions of the fretboard and try to create your own variations of the same pattern. It's a great learning tool.
This is another pattern based exercise, but in this case, Joe Satriani is using the pentatonic, the blues scale in C.
[Applause]
Shred. This is the pattern. The only string that it's not played twice in this pattern is the first string. Then the other strings are played twice. The pattern, you see, it's the same thing with as the first Paul Gilbert exercise we saw. It's just a pattern that gets repeated on different strings, on different positions, but it's basically the same pattern and it creates a longer phrase or a longer run, but the concept is just the same.
If you want to keep improving your technique, here's a great video on speed picking. Check it out and I'll see you next time.