Hi, welcome to the first of my monthly lesson here at Insane Guitar.com.

First of all I want to say thanks to Joel for the availably and the opportunity he gave me.

Well let's start this first lesson with an exercise I usually use to warm my hands before shredding. The phrase starts in B minor for the first 4 bars where we found a descending sequence of this genre ( 5-6, 4-5, 3-4, 2-3, etc..) ending with a diminished chord in Phrygian position. In the forth bar we have a sequence played with the chicken picking technique ( pick every note of the sequence and pull off with the middle finger of the right hand the notes: B and C# on the E string). 5 bar: here we found an A maj arpeggio with added notes. Follows a Fmaj chord ( bar 6 ) always with added notes to create a different voice and a Am chord ( bar 7 ) using the string skipping arpeggios. The use of this technique is great when you need of a open sound for your modulations, because you can add all the notes you want to convert the simple 5th chord into a 11th or 13th chord/arpeggio. As you probably noticed, we have played both the A chords (minor and major) this is because our pedal notes is now A and no more B. When you have a chord without the 3rd grade you can play a minor or a major arpeggios or scale on it and this give you the freedom to look for a particular phrasing instead of the common modes. At bar number 8 we have a sort of pivot note but I preferred to pick every note twice instead of the classical pivot technique because here is similar to a sweep sequence in two near strings, so you can have faster sequence and higher precision when you picking. This lead us to bar number 9 where we have a fast descending Am arpeggio and a ascending Am add9 sequence until the three notes per string arpeggios sequence that are: Am, Emaj, A# dim, Dmaj, G#dim, Emaj, Cdim, Emja, Adim, Emaj. That's all I advice you to play slow, very slow, and try also to understand which kind of patterns I preferred to play the sequence. you can change the positions of the patterns in the way you like because everyone have a different approach to guitar, so, find your better way to play it and develop your ideas starting from it. Now it's your time, go practice dude!!!

Download the "Tab Edit" file 

(If you don't have tab edit, get it here)

This is just a warm up example were find some of the most used heavy metal techniques ( alternate picking, sweep picking, chicken picking and

string skipping). It is a good example on how moving on the fret board using different techniques.