Old Tommo here 
I’ve been practicing (guitar-based) songwriting quite a lot in the last few months. For fun, I recently had the idea of writing a song in the style of early 90s videogames (Super Nintendo and the like). The guitar pro midi really sounded like a videogame, while the version “played by humans” sounds a bit more like an early Vinnie Moore song.
I made a little demo for it, then found a very nice guy in an amp simulator forum (Nick Meola) that offered to record a bassline, program some drums and do a proper mix. Infinite thanks to him, he really put a lot of work into this! Here is what we came up with! (For better results, use decent stereo headphones or speakers):
And here are the tabs, if anyone wants to use these licks for picking practice (can you find the Yngwie lick? I squeezed it in there somewhere as a sort of musical Easter egg )
Technique notes
Overall, all the licks featured in here conform to the “mixed escapes” approach (e.g. see the techniques of Vinnie Moore and Batio) - where we have a primary escape that is used most of the time (in my case DSX), and a secondary escape that is only used when required (USX in my case).
In some licks, however, I added hammer ons or pulloffs to get away with a single-escape DSX strategy - see bars 11 or 14, for example.
Here’s a (freely available) reference to the relevant Pickslanting Primer material:
The rhythm guitar technique (in particular the fretting hand) is covered in detail by this recent discussion:
Performance notes
Interestingly enough, I am probably known as a “mainly lead player”, but I am much more satisfied with my rhythm playing here - I double tracked it with no edits, and was very close to the grid at all times, this creates a nice widening effect when listening in stereo.
My leads are ok but a bit floaty over the beat. The tempo is 150bpm, which to me feels like a weird “medium-fast” hybrid in which it’s quite difficult to have a good feel for the beat. This is especially true when the melodies have syncopation and short-ish fast runs with a lot of start-stop, like in this song. I think Jorge Strunz had vaguely similar comments about the difficulties of these medium tempos, in the Strunz & Farah interview.
The first lead is double tracked, and the second is harmonised. Funnily enough, the time inconsistencies in the 2 lead tracks are almost always… consistent So the leads are always 95% in time with each other, but float a bit freely over the rhythm parts.
After many discussions with Nick we decided to leave it as it is - as a bit of a human feel to the track. Hope you’ll feel the same
Songwriting Notes
I’m usually super slow and rational when it comes to writing, but this one was a nice exception. I started by imagining a starship shooting enormous light beams, ya know, early 90s videogames 
So I thought:
Q: What’s the chord progression that makes you feel like you are on a starship?
A: i-VI in natural minor, e.g. Cminor to Ab major in this case, played at medium-fast tempo (150bpm).
Then I needed another chord before going back to i, so I decided to use iv (Fminor here). One could go to G7 of course, but then it all starts sounding neoclassical and not so much like we are in space (Troy is gently training me to not over-rely on V-i). So we have:
| Cm | Cm | Ab | Fm | x 2
Played with power chords with a standard Iron-Maiden-esque rhythm.
After a couple reps, I decided to just do the “Metallica modulation” to give a feeling of increased energy: same chords but two semitones higher: | Dm | Dm | Bb | Gm | x 2 ; then back to the Cm progression.
Then it came to the melody: here I just sang (with terrible pitch ) a syncopated slow-ish melody that floats over the faster rhythm while outlining the Cm - Ab change. The main trick was simply to never use the Ab note during the Cm chord (it’s anyway dissonant and very hard to use musically), and as soon as the Ab maj comes in - boom - we play that Ab on the beat. Oldest trick in the book of the Aeolian mode I guess, but always effective. Then, the rest was just about finding 16th note patterns that outlined nice chord tones on the beat and connected smoothly to the slower melodies. As for the modulations, I just inserted some chromatic passing notes that smoothly connect the keys of Cm and Dm. when going back down, we get for a brief instant the feeling that Gm has become a dominant 7 chord. But that’s quick enough that it never feels like Yngwie-neoclassical territory.
A big learning experience for me was writing the harmonising lead guitar. I started by just going up a 3rd from the main melody - but soon encountered a problem: the main melody hits the F note (perfect 4th) quite often on the Cm chord. If you go up a 3rd you get Ab, which again can sound really unpleasant. After some thinking I found an interesting workaround: whenever the melody plays an F, the harmony guitar will play a Bb, which sounds very nice over a Cm - overall we basically get a Cm7/11. This means the harmony track often has repeated notes, but this is hardly noticeable on top of the main melody, which instead keeps moving.
Phew… I can be verbose Hope someone got something out of this. I certainly had fun writing, recording and talking about it!
PS: many thanks to @BillHoudini and @Twangsta who encouraged me to post this publicly
I get what you mean by the leads sounding a bit floaty, but it’s nothing to really worry about imo. From what I’ve seen of your playing, you could easily get even better takes with a few polishing rounds to the leads.
