Polar Opposites: Andy James playing Yngwie Malmsteen

Masters in Mechanics
#1

I came across two interesting videos of Andy James from ~10years ago, in which he covers a certain Yngwie Malmsteen!

The picking strategies of these two players sit at (approximately) opposite ends of the spectrum: Yngwie has a strong preference for upstroke escape (USX), while Andy is pretty much your textbook downstroke escape (DSX) player**

So it’s very interesting to observe how Andy modified some of the licks to make them playable with his technique. Let’s have a look together and decode some of the most interesting bits :slight_smile:

I hope this will be of inspiration to many around here: even if you don’t have all the known picking techniques under your belt yet, Andy is showing us that you can still go a long way by adopting the right strategies!

** To be fair Andy is in principle able to do the occasional upstroke escape (I think?), but as far as I can see he tends to avoid it whenever possible - you may often see pulloffs in strategic places to avoid that.

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#2

Man he is such a beast. Gotta say, the thing I was most looking forward to did not happen – the 2 string sweep arpeggios at 2:05 in the rising force clip. He went all EVH lol. Still sounds awesome of course, and Yngwie sounds so smooth if I hadn’t seen so many clips of him playing that passage with sweeps and only heard audio, I probably would’ve thought “oh cool Yngwie is tapping”. It would be really interesting to see how Andy James would play that lick with sweeps since DSX is not very conducive to playing a phrase like that.

Just in case I’m totally not making sense, here’s the passage I’m talking about and how Yngwie does it:

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#3

Bonus points for noticing the first AndyJamesization(?) :smiley:

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#5

I think it would be interesting to study this more in depth, it’s hard to see exactly what he is doing at those speeds, I think that sometimes when he demonstrates slow examples he might pick everything but when playing fast he might add a pull off or hammer on here and there to get that legato power up, I believe that’s how he plays the fast long solo from Erotomania aswell. And we know for sure he does pentatonics even numbered groupings starting with an upstroke. What Andy James plays at 3:10 of Far Beyond The Sun I think could be a good blueprint for playing devastating neo classical kinda similar sounding to descending 4 notes groupings then going into a shreddy run of a scale being a main DSX player. 4:36 is another one I see really difficult for DSX players starting on a downstroke.

#6

I like that Andy, despite playing a killer version, totally blows the very ending on Far Beyond the Sun. haha It’s the easy stuff that’ll get ya!

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#7

Great playing by Andy, of course, but I’m just glad we moved out of the “abalone purfling on everything” phase. That was never a good idea in the first place.

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#8

good thing ESP has better designs now :rofl:

#9

One of the things that I’ve never really been great at, and honestly wouldn’t even be on my radar if it wasn’t for this place, is the belief that if you’re going to try to learn someone’s solo, you need to learn it EXACTLY the way they play it, and you can’t rearrange it to make it easier for you because of “authenticity” or something. Which I guess on one hand that’s really a good way to get a better picture on how a players mind ticks and how their technique functions… but this is a great example too where you can just focus on the notes and the sounds and not the actual fingering and technique, and still play the composition, but in a very different manner.

In the classical world this wouldn’t even be on anyone’s radar as a consideration, making sure you used the exact same fingering as Paganini (or, to up thr absurdity, the exact same fingering for a violin melody as Bach!) but for guitar, for whatever reason (the widespread usage of tab?) it’s a pretty big part of the culture. I’ve started to loosen up a little because often times I’ve seen examples where I can look at a tab and know with a fair degree of confidence that’s not how the artist played it just because of the way they tend to build lines, but this is a whole different step.

Of course, in practice, I spend very little time trying to learn other people’s solos, so whatever. :rofl:

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#10

Indeed. As of late, I’ve taken a stance of even further heresy (lol!) and I’ve been changing actual notes in peoples solos that I cover. Gasp!

I’ve been putting Petrucci’s run in the “Another Day” solo on a pedestal for literally decades. Awesome as I think it sounds, if you really listen to the recording, or any live performance for that matter, he’s never squeaky clean, but it’s clearly a scalar run that in places is mixed escape. That wasn’t working out great for me. @tommo suggested I just rehash it to be a DSX run, to hell with whatever he did - find something that works “for me”

Not perfect yet, but still way better than wishing I could play it exactly like him.

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#11

oh yeah that run is a problem, I find I can sometimes get it with secondary motion, I’m DSX main. But the original speed that it’s played at it’s a problem. I think also Petrucci is a USX main which is the opposite of me. If you want to play the same exact run but DSX all picked I guess you could take the Greg Howe approach to picking and just reverse it for DSX. I just find this way it’s natural for me to change the accents and not do the same as doing it the 3nps way, so it doesn’t sound quite the same. He teaches it as part of the “warm ups” here:

But good job on the cover, really well executed.

I find rather than neccesarily changing the notes of the solos is good to use the DSX power ups that Tommo teaches, at least for live playing. It doesn’t always sound the exact same but for live I think it matters very little tbh, vs in actual recordings.

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#12

Is this true? I always thought he was a DSX, I don’t know much of his stuff though so I may be completely wrong. Can anyone from CTC weigh in on this? :slight_smile:

#13

He has a lot of patterns that usx can handle. But he does a fair amount of mixed escape too. I can’t remember what Troy has conclusively labeled him but I suspect some variety of “lightly supinated mixed escape wrist player” is what he is.

His infamous chromatic exercise would require either USX or primary dsx (or neutral I guess) with a helper motion on the string changes. Universal Mind would require either mixed escape or dbx. Same with Glass Prison…though I found a video of that seems primary SWIPE motion lol

The wrist can do just about anything. He is probably something like Andy Wood, Gilbert etc.

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#14

Yeah this makes a lot of sense, was just watching some pentatonic stuff which looked USX but lots of his diatonic playing looks like DSX with a helper so maybe that is the best way to define him :grin:

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#15

maybe he uses both. I recall some of the people mentioning he uses a lot of DWPS in this post. but then again some of his stuff requires also dsx, maybe he has the ability to use both consistenly, I guess it’ll remain a mystery until Troy can get a camera in his guitar (hopefully on SYU aswell), or we can a get a real good angle of a performance. But again I think he has changed his motions over the years. so maybe it’s not the same as before. I think he started as wrist player, now he uses more elbow idk.

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#16

oh thats a lot of swiping lol, I’ve seen some performances seems he uses sweeps now for that mainly.

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#17

Not sure he got any clean string changes but I give him props for trying haha! That is a brave move for a live show.

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