A bit of a tounge twister of a lick

Playing Technique
#1

Hi all,

I’m interested to see how you guys would pick a lick as on analysing it, I’ve found it to be a bit of a two way escape tounge twister.

The lick in question is “that lick” from the intro solo in fade to black by metallica.

At 33 seconds in

Tabbed on just g b e

----14----19-p-14----------15-p-14-------------------------------
15----------------------15-----------------15-----17–15–14------------------------------------16------------------14-----------------16

The interesting part of this lick for me is that The descending arpeggios scream sweep but you need to make a large jump back up to e. This problem seems to result in a thousand different ways to overcome the issue.

I’ve seen a few YouTube covers where people have either messed this up or cold hammer-oned notes to get back up to high e. Even Kirk Hammett hits a bum note on a live version. The common theme seems to be though that you need to hit an escaped downstroke on the g string or you won’t make the jump. Kirk plays this live with dsx with the start of the pull off arpeggio section being a long looping downstroke which escapes and I think comes up under B to usx.

How would you all pick this?

#2

For this kind of stuff - when it’s not too fast - I like to do sweeping for the descending arpeggio and then go back to the top string on an upstroke, see e.g. here starting from about 2:58, I think the requirements of this Vinnie Moore passage are similar to your lick above. Works for me but I realise this is not comfortable for everyone:

Similar strategy here around 1:u5272:

#3

Great playing by the way! Ah yes I can see the strange rotation of the forearm which flicks the pick up like a usx. This was exactly what I was looking for in posting this

Different to the solution my hands found for the same problem which was to roll forward on the string prior to the lowest used in the arpeggio to create a usx, escaping over the lowest string whilst rolling back to dsx then hitting a downstroke to return to the top of the arpeggio. Maybe my hands are just suckers for punishment and so ill try your method and compare.

It’s really weird that such a technique isn’t documented or taught!

1 Like
#4

I know it gets said a lot but it can’t be said enough. Those are some serious chops dude. Amazing playing.

2 Likes
#5

I guess with this tempo any technique would work. I tried to use downstrokes only - kinda messy, but with some practice I feel that I could do it.