When Ozzy Osbourne was booted from Black Sabbath and went solo in 1979, his quest for a heavy-metal soulmate ended with his discovery of Randy Rhoads.
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TheWhen Ozzy Osbourne was booted from Black Sabbath and went solo in 1979, his quest for a heavy-metal soulmate ended with his discovery of Randy Rhoads.
The pair would go on to pen such classic metal cuts as “Crazy Train,” “I Don’t Know,” “Mr. Crowley” and “Flying High Again,” among others.
Unfortunately, Rhoads was around long enough to record only two full-length albums with Ozzy: Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman (the live album, Tribute, was released posthumously in 1987).
On March 19, 1982, while “joyriding” in a small plane piloted by Ozzy’s tour bus driver, Rhoads was killed when the pilot flew too close to the band's parked tour bus, clipped its wing and careened into a nearby house. A fan of classical music, Randy Rhoads was one of the first American guitarists to successfully incorporate classical music elements into heavy metal. (“Euro-metal” guitarists, including Ritchie Blackmore, Yngwie Malmsteen, Uli Jon Roth and Michael Schenker, had also experimented with melding the two genres.)
Reportedly, Rhoads was contemplating retiring from rock after the tour to study classical guitar at UCLA. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at examples in the style of Rhoads’ classically influenced solo piece “Dee” as well as “Diary of a Madman” and “Goodbye to Romance,” two other Ozzy favorites that prominently feature acoustic guitar.
Randy pulled out all the stops for Diary of a Madman’s title track, an epic six-minute-plus piece packed with acoustic and electric guitar textures. Its intro, similar to FIGURE 1, is structured around an elaborate arpeggio passage reminiscent of a modern classical guitar etude by Leo Brouwer (titled "Etudes Simples: VI," published in 1972) which Rhoads likely learned in his classical guitar studies.
Use economy picking to tackle these