Counting the Black Star Lick and others

Playing Technique
#1

Hello all - newbie here. Love this site!

So this is probably a stupid question, but how is Yngwie counting the black star lick? Is it 16th’s starting on the & and landing on the downbeat? Starting on the downbeat and landing on the &? Not 16ths at all? Am I missing something?

Same question for the Example 7 on the Malmsteen REH video (Troy breaks it down in episode 10 of cracking the code “Inside the volcano”).

I realize that my ear should probably be good enough to pick this up - but honestly I’m just not getting it. And it’s really difficult for me to learn the licks with chunking so I can play them fast if I don’t have a down beat of some sort as a mile marker.

As an aside, this raises a bit of a larger question, that keeps coming up for me - do these guys play in odd groupings a lot? I’ve noticed that the tabs always seem to suggest so. In the past, I would get books and look at the notes and see licks with odd sets like 11 and 13 etc. and think “I’m never going to be able to feel that, let alone play it.” In fact, I’ve been playing that Example 7 lick wrong for years and I’m pretty sure it’s because I lifted it off the tab that came with the video. The tab, if memory serves, showed the first two repeating parts of the lick as sets of 11. Putting aside that I now know from Troy’s video that the tab person added a note in the lick (smh), I remember seeing the 11 grouping and thinking - how the eff do these guys think/feel in 11’s??? But I tried to learn it that way anyway, since that’s what the tab said. So I’ve been playing it as a group of 5 on the way up (with a sweep to the e string - somehow I figured that part up on my own) and then sixes on the way down - kinda insane because you are constantly speeding up and slowing down by like a nano second depending on whether you’re going up or down. Makes for an interesting sound and I found it very difficult, so I’m glad I’ve learned it, but trying to use it within improv has been, let’s say, less than ideal.

So do these guys actually play in these odd groupings and just kinda feel the downbeat or are the tabs just wrong a lot?

Ok that was like 15 questions. My bad. You get the idea though.

Halp.

Thanks in advance.

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#2

I think a lot of these examples are “just play fast and try to land on the beat on the last note” :slight_smile:

It is almost impossible to put that down with exact notation, hence the crazy groupings you see in the tabs - in my opinion, that is!

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#3

I was afraid that was the answer lol. Thanks for the reply!!

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#4

@Troy and/or @Brendan any thoughts on this by chance? Not so much on the tabs part, but counting the two Yngwie licks. Any tricks on how you handle it/them?

No worries if you can’t/don’t respond. I know you guys are busy.

#5

I think it’s sort of a ‘feel’ thing, which doesn’t really help much in answering your question :frowning:
A lot of guys who sound really musical when they play, like Malmsteen, Eric Johnson, Eddie Van Halen etc are very free with their time. They care more about the phrase than the placement, so it won’t always line right up to the click.

That said, maybe try grouping it like this, assuming you mean this lick (sorry anyone else who doesn’t have access…buy a membership and support an amazing product!!!)

black star
black star1092×136 21.5 KB

This is 2 chunks that each form a complete musical thought AND start on a down stroke :slight_smile: assuming you follow the picking suggestions in the tab in the link above (I intentionally left them out of the screenshot, just so I’m not giving away too much to people who haven’t paid for the content in the seminars). You could easily play each of these chunks to a click. The first one is a little more ‘slippery’, but both could line up to down beats. Hope that helps!

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#6

If it is any consolation, I also find it difficult to wrap my head around this type of thing. I love listening to Yngwie but in my own playing I much prefer runs in the style of Gilbert / Moore / Petrucci, where there is typically a very precise subdivision of the beat.

But then again I am almost pathological in my approach to timing*, even in trills and vibratos I actually count how may hammer ons / microbends I am doing.

*= this doesn’t guarantee that my timing is great unfortunately :smiley:

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#7

Totally agree with you here Tommo - It’s a start and end thing:
Start on this note - try and land on the end note on the correct beat. Subconsciously speeding up/slowing down to make that happen.

I think EVH said on playing fast “it’s like falling down the stairs and trying to land on your feet” - if you get that?

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#8

@TommyGun
I’ve broken my head trying to do just that. In the end you just got to gun it with feel, look for the accents and hit those milestones. I this clip below, the first solo, I’m struggling to hit the accents, I’ve recorded it many many times, each time is slightly better, sometimes worse, gotta keep and hit that groove, and no amount of counting helps, pure feel. The rest of the track is just winged out of frustration.

I had a bit of an epiphany today though, I’ve been playing those solo 1 lines at all tempos with out the stress of getting it right. The back track below is a small section from the perpetual backtrack looped for practice. Below is not the best take that was happening at the end of the day but, it really really helped internalizing those lines, I know the next time I try to record that solo it’s going to be much better; also figured out many more ways of approaching it and applying them lines in different contexts. The playing is weak on this next track though, early part of the experiment.

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#9

@joebegly Thanks man! That’s how I was thinking about it too.

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#10

@tommo it’s definitely consolation, since you’re a friggin’ monster I see! Amazing playing on that Gilbert track you posted!! Thanks again for your input :pray:

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#11

@Twangsta - you’re a beast! Great playing, man! Love it. Thank you for the input :pray:

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#12

Thanks @shabtronic! I’ll give it a shot. It’s funny - we spend all this time trying to copy these licks and it’s a wonder if THEY ever even play them the same way twice lol

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#13

So something interesting about a lot of Yngwie’s lines, not necessarily the Black Star line, but in general, is he tends to phrase melodically in fours. This is really obvious when he does his actual fours patterns but a lot of his fast lines fit really nicely if you lay them out as 16th notes. As such I tend to practice them like that in order to get proper “chunks” to form, regardless of the actual subdivision/feel I’ll wind up using them at.

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#14

@BlackInMind Thanks - that makes sense. Even the blackstar lick works as 4s (or 16ths) if you start on the & (or if you start on the beat and end on the &). I just wasn’t sure whether there was some trick or obvious thing I was missing. I tend to have a keen sense for missing the obvious. lol