Hello again everyone! Its October, the weather is starting to get cold, leaves are on the ground, and Halloween is around the corner, which is the perfect atmosphere to compliment the 14 minute epic "The Cleansing Fires" on Dark Empire's latest album, "From Refuge to Ruin." If you haven't checked it out, You can do so here:
At the end of this tune, there is a guitar duel between myself and vocalist Brian Larkin (Brian is also a fantastic guitarist, so it made sense to give him an opportunity to showcase those talents somewhere on the album. Live, our 2nd guitarist Christian Colabelli takes the tradeoffs with me). For this week's blog, I'll be going over the first of my solos in the duel. As always, I am playing a 7 string tuned down 1 whole step (ADGCFAD) and for the sake of proper harmonic context I will be referring to the notes in pitch, rather than position:
The Cleansing Fires First Solo Guitar Pro 6
The Cleansing Fires First Solo PDF
I wanted the solo to be fierce, but I'm also really conscious of having a flow, especially when given only 8 bars to take a solo, and not having something that sounds like a run-on sentence of shred licks. I figured the best way to achieve this was to start with a longer, exciting run that would last the first half of the solo, and break it up halfway through with some odd phrasing and finish off with one final descending run to punctuate the ending.
I start off with an ascending tapping run in D minor pentatonic. I'm moving through the scale using string skipping between the low E and D strings, and then the D and B, sliding up an octave in each repetition. This method of sliding into an out of octaves with pentatonics is something I do a lot, and really affords myself the ability to traverse large areas of the fretboard with relative ease. When I reach the high E string, I do something that I've nicknamed "tapping expansions," which is where I move from using 2 fingers on the left hand and one on the right into 3 fingers on the left and two on the right via a rolling pattern. After this, I slide down to the 12th fret and do a descending phrase in 3's down to the D string, before I turn it around and do another string skipping pattern back to the high E, ending with a bend at the 15th fret of the B. Much of this lick involves "floating" meaning, I'm not really paying attention to sticking to a particular rhythmic subdivision with the phrase, but instead I'm "cramming" notes to fit within a desired melodic rhythm of peaks and valleys, which is why you'll see lots of different rhythms used to notate this lick in the tab. This is simply an approximation, although I do often also write licks that purposefully are divided as quintuplets, septuplets, etc.
Next, I start a phrase in quarter note triplets using a D diminished 7th arpeggio. The nature of the riff I'm playing behind, which is primarily just a chugging low D5 chord, enables me to switch tonalities pretty easily since its so wide open, so I'm able to move to a more dissonant sound here because of that. I felt the combination of the diminished harmony with the 3 against two feel of the line created a sense of unease, further increased by bending up to the final note of the arpeggio from the 22nd fret. The last lick of the solo is based on an intervalic approach to a D half/whole diminished scale, in which I take a minor 3rd/whole step pattern down in a very erratic, disjointed sounding phrase. I really like creating different intervalic phrases based on notes from the diminished scale, because you can really get a wide variety of riff and lick ideas from it. This is a pretty interesting subject, so perhaps I'll create a lesson touching upon it for a future blog if enough people are interested.
Thats it for today. As always, feel free to email me if you'd be interested in setting up a free trial Skype webcam guitar lesson. And also, remember to Like Dark Empire on Facebook and check out our new album "From Refuge to Ruin" on Nightmare Records and iTunes.
See you next time,
Matt
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