Related Content

• Fender Custom Shop Announces New Yngwie Malmsteen Tribute Stratocaster guitar
• Born to Burn: Yngwie Malmsteen

Originally printed in Guitar World Magazine, July 2008

Gain speed and spontaneity by linking Phrygian, harmonic minor and diminished-seven arpeggios.

Much of the music I write and play is based on three musical forms: Phrygian and natural minor scales; the harmonic minor scale and its fifth mode, Phrygiandominant; and the diminished-seven arpeggio. When you examine these forms, you discover how closely related they are to each other, and how easy it is to link them together.

Let’s start with E Phrygian (E F G A B C D), which can also be thought of as A natural minor (A B C D E F G) (FIGURE 1a). Primarily using alternate picking, I descend through the scale in four-note groups, with each subsequent group starting one scale degree lower than the previous group. For example, I begin (in bar 1) by playing C B A G, and then I begin the next group by starting one note lower, on B, and play B A G F. Played this way, you can clearly hear the scale being broken up into even groups of four notes (FIGURE 1b) that descend the length of the fretboard.

If we think of this scale as E Phrygian, the intervallic structure is 1 f2 (“flat two”) f3 4 5 f6 f7, and the chord that goes with the scale is Em. If we think of the scale as A natural minor, the intervallic structure is 1 2 f3 4 5 f6 f7, and the chord that goes with the scale is Am. Notice that the only difference between the two scales is the second scale degree: in E Phrygian it’s f2, and in A natural minor it’s 2 (“natural two”).

This type of sound is exactly what I was going for from very early on. The whole reason I play the way I do is that I wanted to move away from the typical things most guitar players did and had been doing for a long time. I wanted to challenge myself, mainly, by trying to play some crazy stuff that was originally done on the violin, which of course is a completely different instrument. For one thing, the violin is tuned in fifths (low to high, G D A E), while the guitar is tuned mostly in fourths. In addition, the violin’s scale— the “speaking length” of its strings—is much shorter than the guitar’s. Combining the short scale with the tuning in fifths allows the violin to have a lot more notes available within a given position. On violin, you can move your fingers less than you do playing guitar and yet cover a wider pitch range.

It’s a bit of a challenge to apply this approach to the guitar, but that’s what I dug, and I still do. As much as I love the blues, the main reason I ventured away from it was that I felt it was a “boxedin” approach to the guitar and music, and I wanted to break out of the box.

The natural progression for me was to move into incorporating scales like harmonic minor (FIGURE 2a), played here in the key of A (A B C D E F Gs); intervallically, A harmonic minor is spelled 1 2 f3 4 5 f6 7. This scale is nearly identical to A natural minor, the only difference being the seventh degree, which in harmonic minor is major, or natural. Now, if you take these same set of notes and invert your frame of reference from A minor to E, you get E Phrygian-dominant (E F Gs A B C D) (FIGURE 2b), which is intervallically spelled 1 f2 3 4 5 f6 f7. This scale is nearly identical to Phrygian, the only difference being that the third degree in Phrygian-dominant is major and not minor or “flatted.” E Phrygian-dominant is the fifth mode of A harmonic minor and comprises the same seven notes. What makes it sound like E Phrygian-dominant (instead of A harmonic minor) is its orientation around E as being the root note instead of A. This scale sounds beautifully exotic when played over an E major chord.

The presence of the major third in Phrygian-dominant links this scale perfectly with the diminished-seven arpeggio. Here’s a shape I like to use to play diminished-seven arpeggios up and down the neck (FIGURE 3). If one were to play an F diminished-seven arpeggio (F Gs B D), the notes would also be found residing within the E Phrygian-dominant scale. So, in the key of A minor, you can mix and match and throw together these three resources— the A harmonic minor and E Phrygiandominant scales and the F diminishedseven arpeggio—anyway you like.

A good way to acquaint yourself with the two aforementioned scales is to play them back-to-back (FIGURE 4a), being aware of changing the tonic, or root note, from one point of reference to the other (A to E in this case).

Doing this across all of the strings might seem complicated, so it’s useful to practice the scale on just one string (FIGURE 4b); if you learn that “form,” you can come up with different patterns, such as this (FIGURE 4c). Sticking with the high E string, E Phrygiandominant is played like this (FIGURE 5a) and A harmonic minor is played like this (FIGURE 5b). Relative to an A root note, Gs is the major seventh; relative to an E root, Gs is the major third. And here’s how the F diminished-seven arpeggio links the two scales together (FIGURE 6). When played over an E chord or an E bass note, the notes of F. diminished-seven (F Gs B D) outline an E7f9 arpeggio (E Gs B D F), minus the E root, with the F note functioning as the f9 (“flat-nine”). This approach is very much the “bread and butter” of what I like to do in my own music.

Once you are familiar with these forms, you can use them to create all sorts of different patterns. For instance, you can play “shapes” that traverse the strings, selectively leaving out specific scale degrees (FIGURE 7a). Then you can try starting higher up on the fretboard and including more scale tones (FIGURE 7b). Link these shapes together with diminished-seven arpeggio shapes played up and down two strings (FIGURE 8a). You can also apply the same idea to a three-string diminished- seven lick (FIGURE 8b).

People always ask me about my playing technique, and I’ll never forget the first time I went to Japan, back in the early Eighties. They asked me, “How do you do this?” and “How do you do that?” and I said, “I don’t know, man!” Everyone thinks I’m full of it when I say this, but it’s the truth. When I’m asked for advice, I always say, “Play with your ears. When it sounds good, it’s good.” If you have good ears, you’ll know when it’s good. When I started, I knew that I wanted my playing to be note-for-note clean. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing, but I knew what I wanted to hear. And I worked very hard on it until I got what I wanted.

COMBINING LEGATO AND PICKING

Legato, the articulation technique wherein the majority of the notes are sounded with hammer-ons and pulloffs, is a beautiful thing. My favorite legato player is Allan Holdsworth; I think he’s amazing. Legato is great because you can play something like this (FIGURE 9a) without picking at all. That gives you a certain tone that is very smooth and flowing, and then you can pick all the notes to get a different kind of tone that’s more percussive (FIGURE 9b). Here are two choices, and it’s great to combine them to get a balance between staccato, which is picking every note, and legato (FIGURE 9c). A more staccato style sounds great on the low strings, and I like how it sounds when balanced by fast legato playing. What I like about arpeggios is that they sound powerful, impressive and very dramatic.

When picking fast passages, I usually break up the straight alternate-picking approach when I move from string to string, sometimes using two downstrokes, or two upstrokes, in a row. The truth is that I don’t know what I do; I have never really analyzed it. My picking technique is natural for me, so the variables are whatever they are, and they’ve been that way for a long time. I used to have a bass player a long time ago that looked at my picking hand and said, “It looks like you’re knitting!”

PIZZICATO

This is a violin technique called pizzicato, wherein you sound some of the notes by pulling off to the open string with the fingering hand (FIGURE 10). If you use that hand only, you get this (FIGURE 11, bars 1–5). Then I switch to the pizzicato technique (bar 6) and finish the idea with a combination of alternate picking and pull-offs. All of the different elements work well together and offer you some choices while you are improvising, which can help you keep your solos exciting and spontaneous.

Related