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:
When I first created a website on lessons, I pretty much posted all the riffs, etc that made up a practice regimen I had. One of the riffs I used to practice was a string skipping riff from Paul Gilbert's Intense Rock video. I modified it to be a Dominant 7th arpeggio. You can see that lesson here. In this last Scarified arpeggio lick, Paul is playing arpeggios based on the exact concept he described in his video. In this case he is playing two shapes: a Maj6 (equivalent to Min7 when the Min7 root note is a minor 3rd down from the root of the Maj6) and a Diminished 7th. Due to the symmetry of the Diminished 7th chord/arpeggio, for any given shape, it has 4 equivalent names. I won't get into this whole business of equivalent chords... You can google it for a more thorough understanding!
Here are the two shapes used during this riff. Yes believe it or not, this long riff only contains two unique shapes which makes it much easier than it sounds.
Above is the tab for the riff. As I mentioned above, there are only two unique shapes he is playing. He is simply moving them around to come up with a chord/arpeggio progression. So the key here is to master each shape. The toughest part will be the stretching but I have small hands and if I can play this anyone can.
Enjoy!
Perhaps next time I will go over some of the alternate picking riffs in Scarified.
Lessons
