[MUSIC]
That's an excerpt from John Petrucci's solo
from the song Erotomania off the record Awake.
I included it as an example because it almost
looks like an exact replica of what we were playing in the scale shapes.
To give a quick breakdown of what's going on in the solo,
Petrucci's in the key of C,
and Petrucci starts in lane 2 in the middle. The C is here.
[MUSIC] I'll play the shape first, shape 1.
Familiar? [MUSIC] The way that Petrucci composed this is very much like an exercise,
but he has just enough shifting in the notes to make it a musical statement.
Instead of playing the scale just up and down,
[MUSIC] he starts with the third note of the scale,
and rolls down, and rolls back up.
[MUSIC] The other thing that he plays is,
they're not perfect 16th notes,
they are actually five notes per beat or a quintuplets.
There's a five-note phrase,
so every beat that goes by,
five notes go by.
[MUSIC] See all of those 1,
2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3,
4, 5 I just played?
The last thing is he does a pick up for the first two notes,
so the downbeat is actually the first finger.
It's [MUSIC] downbeat right there.
[MUSIC] Every time that the pattern shifts lanes,
which I'm going to play in a moment,
you're actually ahead of the bar by the two quintuplets.
Those three little changes made something that
was an exercise if he had played it like this,
[MUSIC] which is just
playing up each of scale shape and moving to the different strength sets.
He turned it into a piece of music which sounds pretty cool.
Here is one to one with the pattern that he created with it.
[MUSIC] He goes shape
1 in the middle lane and then just moves in octave down to shape 1 on the low lane.
Here's the transition again.
[MUSIC] Now, he goes to shape 7,
so he's keeps moving down shape numbers.
We go to the seventh degree,
we play that in the middle lane,
and here's what that one sounds like when we play
the same pattern of notes but using shape 7.
[MUSIC] Remember shape 1 did the pattern and went like this,
[MUSIC] and then the shape 7 will look like this.
[MUSIC] But what we want to do is put the shape 1 on the low lane in-between that.
[MUSIC] Then what we do is we take shape 7,
and you think, "I got it," he's going to move it down again.
But no, he actually moves it up this time.
He's being not random,
but he selected these further sonic qualities
and the idea in all music where you want to set up
an expectation and then either fulfill it or go somewhere that's
equally satisfying to the ear that would be a nice surprise.
In this case, the sound is what you expect, it's still seven,
[MUSIC] but not exactly what
you would expect that was going down, so he's going to go up.
[MUSIC] Right there, we have shape 1 in the middle,
shape 1 low, shape 7 in the middle, shape 7 high.
We have one.
[MUSIC] Then what he does is he tricks us again.
We go to shape 6, but you think,
"Oh, he's going to go back to the middle."
But no, he doesn't.
He goes on the same strings,
[MUSIC] so seven here,
[MUSIC] and then he jumps back to the middle.
[MUSIC] So far, it's been a perfect exercise in that it goes shape 1,
7, shape 6, drops down as a degree shape-wise every time.
But he changes which strings that he plays it on every single time that he does it.
He's slightly changing the expectation,
your ears not getting bored with it,
as if you had gone, [MUSIC] which is not terrible.
[MUSIC] It's a great exercise but
that didn't sound nearly as cool as what he had come up with.
The next shape you'd think,
"Oh, he's going to play shape 5."
He actually does play shape 5,
just think of it as a shape on the top strings
[MUSIC] and then a shape dropped into the middle strings.
[MUSIC] He replaces shape 5
with what would be the notes for harmonic minor briefly because,
again, this is a piece of music,
and he's using his ears as much as getting going by using these shape ideas.
Right here, we have the harmonic minor fragment.
[MUSIC] Then you'd think,
"Okay, if we keep going, it's going to be shape 4."
He skips over shape 4,
so then we jump to shape 3.
[MUSIC] He maintains staying on the top strings
to middle strings because we had that harmonic minor change there in the middle,
so that made that expectation of which strings that you are on.
He changed the scale, so that set up that section.
Now we have [MUSIC] third degree of the key of C is E,
so that's where we are, and we're going to play shape 3.
[MUSIC] Then we're going to drop to the middle.
[MUSIC] That was shape 3 an octave lower.
Then that shape 4 that we left out,
we go back to those two strings,
[MUSIC] and then just finish it off with a triplet at the end.
[MUSIC] Then you're going to land on
an upstroke at the end if you do the picking correctly.
I actually started in the middle of the solo where it ends up in
the key of C so I could demonstrate the shapes moving and pivoting.
Let's go back to measure 1 of the solo and play the first four bars of the solo.
We're going to be in the key of F to
start that one because he does a little key change in there.
In the key of F, we have an E,
[MUSIC] that becomes the seventh note of the key.
E is the seventh to the key of F,
and so we'll do shape 7. Here's the pattern.
[MUSIC] There's what he starts off with,
and he starts off with a pickup.
It's ta-ra one, so we got [MUSIC] one.
Instead of moving every single time,
we actually do another little change to the motif.
We replace part of it of what was on string 3,
he moves to string 2.
Right there, it would be on shape 5 if we were to look at what note that is of the key.
[MUSIC] See? He's going to go like this.
[MUSIC] He does a little string skip.
Now, we've got another motif using the shapes but using them
in a creative way where you're not playing
every single note of all the shapes like we did with the rest of them,
[MUSIC] we played all the notes in there.
This is we're moving from shape to shape without it actually hitting every single note.
[MUSIC] That's the second passage.
Then we go to the first passage, we repeat that again.
[MUSIC] Then this time,
we start the passage on the fifth string,
which is if I did the shape, it'd be shape 1.
[MUSIC] Here's the notes of the fifth string of shape 1.
[MUSIC] He starts the phrase there,
[MUSIC] but then we end it where we'd normally end it on seven.
[MUSIC] Let me put that all together.
We do the phrase in its normal way,
[MUSIC] and then we do it with the string skipping to shape 5,
[MUSIC] and then we do it regular way again,
[MUSIC] and then we start the pattern on the fifth string.
[MUSIC] Now, after you finish that grouping,
he moves the entire thing that I just played,
all of that slides down one shape.
We have [MUSIC] that's shape 6, we were on seven,
so the next shape will be four [MUSIC] like that,
and then we have shape 6,
[MUSIC] and then what would be seven,
[MUSIC] [inaudible] and that's the fifth string of seven.
[MUSIC] Then that leads us to the key of C,
the pivot shape [MUSIC] and we'll seamlessly move to the key of
C. I'll play the whole solo,
but I'll play it at that tempo,
that slow tempo, so you can watch what I'm doing.
Here it is.
[MUSIC]
That
is a perfect real-world example of using the lanes,
the shapes to create the major scale patterns,
and use them in a solo in the metal style.
[MUSIC]