It has been a while since I played shred style guitar and so I thought I would return to the very place where I started learning guitar - with Paul Gilbert. I bought a Paul Gilbert instructional video when I first started learning to play guitar which gave me a shredding foundation right from the beginning. In that video, Paul shows you how to play arpeggios using string skipping. Below are some great instructional materials from Paul Gilbert:

Paul applies the string skipping technique quite nicely in Scarified.

Scarified was originally on the Racer X CD Second Heat, but it is the version on YouTube that has overshadowed the original version. You can see the video below:

In the previous guitar lesson we covered the first Scarified arpeggio riff which was a 2 bar riff that alternated between Major and Diminished triads and which used repeated fingering patterns as the riff moved along. The second arpeggio riff comes in at about 1:01 and also features some structure which is very common with Paul Gilbert riffs. This riff is longer and much harder than the first, but once you uncover the structure and simplify the fingerings it is actually fairly easy.

Above is the tab for this long riff. I looked at many tabs of this song but didn't find one that completely meshed with me. My main goal was to use repeated patterns as much as possible and to minimize position shifting within a measure. You will notice that I have indicated 3 main patterns. These patterns repeat throughout the riff and comprise the majority of the riff. So nailing these patterns helps greatly with the overall riff. Most of the other parts of the riff are just variations of the main patterns but requiring slightly different fingering. For instance, notice that the first two beats of measure 2 and 6 are similar in spirit to Main Pattern 1. Also notice that the last 2 beats of measure 6 are similar to Main Pattern 3. We could also just reduce everything pretty much to 2 patterns since Main Patterns 1 and 3 are similar in spirit. But I wanted to make them distinct since they are repeated several times in the riff.

I have also specified the chord types in the tab. I am no master theorist and so I could be off... One thing to note is that whereas last time he was playing basic triad arpeggios, this time he makes things a little more interesting by adding the 9. To understand this, just consider the notes of an F# Minor Scale. They are F#, G#, A, B, C#, D, E. A regular F Min triad would contain the 1, 3 and 5 notes. That would correspond to F#, A and C#. The so called 9 is the same thing as the 2 and so any chord with an add9 designation just means that you are adding the second note of the scale from which the chord/arpeggio is derived. The second note of F# Minor is G# and so the F# Min (add9) arpeggio has the notes F#, A, C# and G#. These are notes Paul is playing in the first bar of the riff. The other bars feature add9 extensions as well (which you can confirm using the logic I just described) with the exception of measure 6 which is a B Min7.

To really bring out the compositional nature of the riff, I layered the chords (as a string ensemble section) on top of my recording so you can hear how the riff sounds on top of the basic chords. I left out the add9 extensions and used the basic triad chords (and used a regular B Min in bar 6).

One last thing to note is that most of the riff is based on chords that are all in the key of F # Minor (or you could view it as A Major). The only exception is the C# Major that he plays at the end. If this was a C# Minor then the entire riff would be diatonic. But that would be boring! And it also brings a nice close to the riff as the C# Maj makes for a cooler sounding alternation wit ht he F# Min.

So hopefully you can use these concepts for creating your own riffs!

Next time we will look at the final arpeggio riff (the one that comes in around 2:47) which is a return to the string skipping approach of playing arpeggios.

Later,

Brian