Tosin Abasi strides into a Hollywood photo studio dressed in a crisp striped jersey, jeans and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that make him look a bit like the young Dizzy Gillespie. He’s toting a pair of the Ibanez eight-string guitars that have become his stock in trade, sleek-bodied instruments with broad, massive necks that carry the heft and menace of weaponry.

This month, I'd like to address an essential point of focus for every good metal player: how to best strengthen the pick-hand technique. The examples I'm going to show you cover a wide variety of pick-hand techniques, from using all downstrokes the alternate picking to economy picking and more, offering a systematic approach to building up these different techniques that will allow you to play with more expression, control and power.

This month, I'd like to talk about a cool, useful technique I sometimes use called “double picking,” which involves repeating each note in a melody twice using alternate (down-up) picking. A good example of this technique can be found in the first solo I play in “An Infinite Regression,” from Animals as Leaders’ latest release, Weightless.

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.