In last month’s installment of Chop Shop, we looked at a classical-flavored run in E minor that incorporated arpeggios, octaves and a simple but cool-sounding octave finger tap.
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This month
In last month’s installment of Chop Shop, we looked at a classical-flavored run in E minor that incorporated arpeggios, octaves and a simple but cool-sounding octave finger tap.
This month we’re going to expand upon that approach by again employing arpeggios, this time also bringing in some sweep picking, a sliding finger tap, pinch harmonics and behind-the-nut string bending.
FIGURE 1 illustrates this month’s lick, which we’ll break up into sections that can be mastered one at a time. Section 1 uses the neck pickup and begins with an ascending B minor arpeggio (B D F#) shape in seventh position.
Next, slide up the neck for a D major arpeggio (D F# A), which, in this context, creates a Bm7 (B D F# A) sound, before sliding up to 12th position and descending using our old friend the E minor pentatonic scale (E G A B D). As you’ll notice in the video for this month’s lesson, I pick using only downstrokes for the first 10 notes, together with a couple of hammer-ons and legato finger slides. I then revert to strict alternate picking (down, up, down, up, etc) for the E minor pentatonic descent.
Section 2 is where we start to put the pedal to the metal, in terms of speed, while staying on the neck pickup. This section starts off with an Fmaj7 (F A C E) sweep arpeggio, performed with a single downstroke across the top four strings, using the fret-hand fingering shape shown in PHOTO 1.
The secret behind successful sweep picking is to not let the notes ring into each other like a strummed chord. This is accomplished by relaxing the fretting finger on each note before the next one sounds.
Immediately following the sweep, I