Can anyone play this Yngwie lick?

Just wondering if anyone has been able to get this Yngwie 6’s lick up to speed and played without error as he does?
(Slow down to 25% to hear how insanely accurately Yngwie plays it!)

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I went to a concert in Houston when he released this album, he was on fire. I like this album, but many people don’t. Sheeeeet 95% speed is cookin’ bro, make my fingers hurt! :sweat_smile: If i could let the shift from the pinky 124 and 123 ring finger grouping near the higher end of the fretboard become more ingrained i could clean it up a bit better. but i top out around 90-95 percent speed on it from how it feels. Cool lick though thanks for bringing up some of my listening past. :stuck_out_tongue:

if we are talking his 6s stuff i really think his open string usage of that pattern on vivace is some of his best phrasing out of his entire library. not to mention the solo on that song is his best as well just my opinion, but that song is heavenly. not going to lie if i really listen it could make me tear up not like i would cry, but his soloing here is pretty emotional.

this brings up a great point if you ever find any fragments you like always remember to try it with an open string it can unlock new ideas, and maybe something magical.

dude his funnest song is braveheart, has that sea shanty vibe, i love this part, this was an album i missed, but it quickly became one of my favorites i love this section, some of his best stuff as well. makes me want to listen to alestorm. :smiley:

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If thou provideth thy tab, I sureth can try =D

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its not too difficult he is just running up the high e string starting on the 7th tone of the scale, you could think of it as starting from the 2nd tone of the scale as well, structurally wise it may be the 2. just think like the normal 4s ascended single string phrase, but with 312321 pattern. he does some little twists at the end though so just use your ears, you can figure it out. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yep agreed! It’s one thing to get one rep clean at the right speed, but then to execute the shifts with enough time to kick off the next round - unbelievable! I would probably need to record them one by one and then splice them together! haha

This is an example to me of why Yngwie is so good. I clocked this lick at slightly under 200bpms - which is very fast. Players can certainly play faster - but can they hit every note clean in a 73 note sequence consistently without error? Yngwie passes the 25% slow down test better than any player I have heard (IMO).

Thanks for the other clips ! Really like the shanty :rofl:

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I kept trying to get Cesario to cover this song, but he never did. I don’t know if he likes it, but I think it sounds cool, and fun. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Sounds like an Yngwie version of “Over the Hills and far away” to me.

Here’s my attempt, not as clean as Yngwie but vaguely ballpark :grin:

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First of all, I hope no one reads any of this wrong. It’s mean to be a post that’s highly encouraging to all of us.

I love Yngwie. Easily one of the best ever, huge influence on me pursuing the guitar virtuoso stuff. That said…

If I’m honest, slowing this down to 25% shows how not accurate it is, in places. It’s of course great playing, but sometimes he’s early, sometimes he’s late and there is one place where there are ‘doubled’ (i.e. non synced) notes. I hear that de-synced thing on the second 6 note pattern at the 4:15 mark. That said, full speed it sounds awesome. And yeah, he is pretty darn clean. He’s largely in sync with himself. I just think if we put these guys on a pedestal, we’ll never be 100% happy with anything we play ourselves.

Absolutely! Great take! Just saying “it’s not as clean as Yngwie” won’t help you though. Identifying the areas that aren’t as clean will give you something concrete to address.

Like I mentioned above, try slowing yours down to 25% and see what you hear. I hear the beginning of the phrase, you’re a little early, a couple places where the last few notes of the 6 note pattern aren’t synced, but some reps where it’s dead on too. And that’s not me saying I could do better (or even as good as you lol!), but I’m pretty confident you’ve got it in you to play it just as clean as Yngwie. And you’re not that far off at all. Full speed, yours sounds awesome too. In a full band context, not the ultra exposed playing to a metronome like you’re doing, most people wouldn’t hear any flaws.

I think we should all cut ourselves a break and not give the pros a free pass on everything :wink:

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Oh god! :dizzy_face:

Great point!

Just tabbed it out! Basically ascending up his mix of F# Aeolian/Harmonic Minor but avoiding the awkward shapes of Harmonic Minor and keeping the easy one :grin:

EDIT:
Also the version I play in my video is wrong, on the very last phrase he jumps up a shape which I didn’t notice until tabbing it out

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Agree there is a slight imperfection at the 4:15 min mark. I have spent a lot of time with my own playing in the 25% speed mode and indeed did an experiment to see if I could clean up the pop tarts lick at 200 bpm over a year of practice. What I found is I could not clean it up past a certain point.

One of the things for me was also that I couldn’t tell after playing the lick if I nailed it 100% or missed some notes unit after I did the 25% slow down test. So I was maybe missing 2 or 3 notes per take - and after year I maybe got to missing 1 -2 notes per take.

Anyway, back to Yngwie - I still maintain he is the best 25% slow down player I have heard. Paul Gilbert is very good too (especially that early video lesson stuff) - but for me Yngwie’s accuracy at high speed (certainly in the early days) is without peer imo.

By the way @Troy is highly accurate on slow down as well. Be keen to hear how he was able to get his error rate down!

EDIT:

Very, very good @Jacklr ! Better than I could do! - speed nailed. As Joe said with some focused clean up and you get it. Be very interested if you feel that is something you would take on as goal.

For me I know what it would take from an effort stand point for me to try and nail this lick and I’m not willing to take it on. LOL

I feel my natural speed is about 20-30 bpm lower than Yngwie’s natural speed so I have to redline it to get there and make errors. Also I have started for the first time to get pain from playing so I am easing back a bit.

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Thanks! Yeah definitely in the future, at the moment I’m working on DSX wrist and I’m still stoked I can hit 125bpm 16th trips with wrist+forearm so pushing it further is not something I’ve pursued a lot at the moment :slight_smile:

I don’t think it would be too bad to get there, I just need to get more comfortable in that zone. Overall, I think it’s great for my technique because there is a lot less room for error when approaching 200bpm 16ths

How is your Dsx wrist compared to your forearm and wrist usx motion? Can you hit the same speeds? Do you find one easier than the other?
Just curious, hope you don’t mind me asking!

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Hard to say for sure because it’s still very new, I can recall it instantly which is a good sign but I’m only comfortable playing on the high e with it at the moment :grin:

I learnt the motion at 115bpm 16th note trips so that feels good and getting up to 125bpm feels okay but I think the problem is that a DSX motion wants the first note to be accented with an upstroke because all the upstrokes are heavily trapped while the downstrokes only lightly escape, this makes accenting with downstrokes quite hard

My issue is that accenting with upstrokes feels completely alien to me, so my chunking/sync isn’t working well when I try to push it much faster

It makes me thing of Paul Gilbert wrongly remembering that his teacher said said he could only play with upstrokes, that might of actually been really useful in learning this type of motion :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Was it just random? That is my “perfection” problem in general. My errors are not consistent so I have a moving target :slight_smile: fix one, a new one pops up somewhere else.

Yes! I know how to get a good motion now (all thanks to Troy), but I still don’t know how to eliminate errors. I would love to see a candid journal type of video series from Troy if he were trying something he can’t yet play (i.e. solo that has a challenging tempo for him that he hasn’t ever learned). It would just be interesting to see how he goes about it.

Fair enough. I don’t spend much time listening to things at 25%. Maybe just the very fastest part of a solo when I am transcribing and can’t make the notes out. I will take your word for it :wink: Have you ever tried that with Al Di Meola? He always struck me as being very clean and locked into the click.

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That’s a good start for sure!

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Random. So there were certain notes that trip me up - say in the pop tarts lick 43 note sequence I was doing, there was 4 or 5 problem notes. But which one would trip me up in a given take was random. I recorded everything so I could analyse with accuracy what was going wrong where.

I liken it to a formula one race track - there are straights and chicanes, and certain notes on a lick will be chicanes where you have to navigate more carefully.

But I think people have different chicanes! For some weird reason notes with my second finger of the left hand have problems! With this Yngwie lick, I would definitely have issues with note 6 of each sequence as it is the one prior to the hand shift - that would need to be worked on.

I actually turned to classical training to see if I could figure error reduction out - and there is a school of thought that what we are doing (trying to fix notes that pop out at high speed- whack a mole style) is not the way to go. You have to practice very slowly and bring slow perfection up to speed. I found some issues with that though - a) it was the start of arm pain for me (that may have been developing anyway from over practice) b) it didn’t improve my error rates at high speed c) Yngwie claims he didn’t do slow practice

Troy is highly accurate. I would love to know how he goes about error reduction. He clearly advocates chunking for overall sync - but my experience with chunking is it will clean up your overall sync, but did not fix all my errors if going for a 100% clean run.

I feel I am an accurate player - but not highly accurate. Based on my current experience, if I was to try and learn for example the Jet to Jet solo and be able to play it error free would literally take years of focused practice. Even then, there would be in almost every take random errors on 25% slowdown playback.

Is there a genetic component to unforced errors as there is in sport (e.g. tennis)? I don’t know! Is Yngwie the guitar version of Novak Djokovic? :joy:

What is an acceptable error rate in a shred solo?

These are the questions I ponder…LOL

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I think you are perceiving it harder than what it truly is, and you would surprise yourself if you actually learned the entirety of that solo. played through it 5-10 times a day for about 3 months, you would be shredding it for sure, if not faster than the man himself.

i am dead serious i challenge you what do you have to lose? at least you will come out with some phrasing under your belt along that journey, and you might succeed.

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You also should take into account that anything as physically involved as guitar, will have its on and off days. I’m sure there are days when the elite players play horribly (to their standards) much like there are days when elite athletes have a bad game. You only practice to decrease that margin of error or increase that baseline of consistency

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thanks for the encouragements - I did try and tackle a lick from the Too Young To Die Too Drunk To Live solo a couple of years ago. It took me almost a year to get one small part of the solo down and it still wasn’t quite right. I am a better alternate picker now, but the thought of the work involved just makes me baulk at taking it on.

Another example, it has taken me a year to get the pop tarts lick close to clean at 200 bpm. I was spending one to two hours a night on it. I think it just takes me wayyyy longer than others to get alternate picking licks down clean.