I spend a majority of my time these days, thinking about the future, and what it could mean for the human civilisation. I don’t think that I necessarily think about technology all the time, but humanity as a whole. As we reach the technological singularity of this century, many aspects of our lives will change rapidly. I think what’s interesting about now, and specifically now, is that lots of technologies are falling into their respective places, assembling themselves into a nearly-solved puzzle, complementing each other, and making the possibility of a singularity even higher.

What many of us have overlooked however, is the fact that lots of people oppose change, and they do this with the utmost dedication, almost similar to the Luddite movement in the early nineteenth century. An interesting argument put forward by many Luddites is that technological advances are against nature itself. I strongly disagree. This could be looked at from many different perspectives, and the way I see it, technological advances define the very fundamentals of evolution. Luddism makes a strong point against this, and by doing so, they leave me confused as to where a Luddite should draw the line.

Let’s assume that a Luddite opposes the idea of transhumanism, or a human with every part of his body replaced by mechanical/bionic parts. The question is, when exactly does the Luddite start opposing the use of such bionic replacements? Are we not already making this transition towards a trans-humanist state by the use of medicine and surgery? If we already have widespread use of devices such as the MHV and bone replacements, how far we from a trans-humanist state? I believe that the shift towards trans-humanism started a long time ago, with the invention of the wheel, with the discovery of fire, to the first shuttle launch. So, does a Luddite stop taking cough medicine? Should a Luddite oppose the use of MHV if that was his only chance of survival? And at the rate that we’re advancing, it’s likely that almost the whole human body should be able to be replaced very soon. What would Luddites do then? Would they draw lines according to what they see fit? Would they use teleportation when it’s available, just becausei it’s fast and fits their needs, while at the same time refusing to replace their body parts just because it goes against a political/religious viewpoint?

When somebody argues that technologies such as cloning, cryogenics or transhumanism are dangerous, I sense a deep hypocrytic and senseless agenda. Evolution isn’t just our bodies evolving naturally over millions of years. When we replace a blind persons eye with a nanotech camera that is able to transmit feeds to the brain, we are not deviating from nature, because the technological advancement is natural itself. We humans as cavemen fought to survive against much larger animals and we conqeured the fields of medicine and made a 100-year life possible. Why should an immortal transhumanist state go against nature?

What Luddites fail to see is, that human change is evolution, evolution is natural, and by virtue, everything humans do for the collective advancement of humanity, must in fact be part of nature.

Now, I’m a huge fan of neoclassical metal. Like astrophysics, neoclassical metal takes years of dedication, not to mention the music theory and lots of practice. It’s not for the faint-hearted. You need to have the speed and technical ability to pull of lightning fast arpeggios and badass alternate picking.

The problem with most guitarists, is that they tend to want to learn the fast/tough licks as fast as possible. This is a problem most people don’t realise. If you’re finding it difficult to play fast licks, there’s probably a reason for it. And the reason is that your hands are not trained to play these licks. You can’t pull off a Michael Phelps every other day can you? There seems to be only one solution to this; PRACTICE. Sure, attempting to play fast licks a year into guitar is challenging and fun. But like all other things in life, you have to learn to take things step by step. Train your fingers, learn music theory, practice with a metronome every single day until you can easily play fast licks. See, there’s no fun playing something if it hurts your fingers. It’s not about showing off your speed, it’s about being able to pull it off easily and make it look easy.

Pedal Tones

If you’re already into playing neoclassical, you should know by now that Yngwie Malmsteen is probably the most badass neoclassical guitar god out there. I don’t have to elaborate, his music talks for itself.

Starting out, I knew of pedal tones, but never got around to study them in detail until I stumbled across an old magazine column by Malmsteen. He goes on to say:

One way you can make your scales sound more melodic and intersting is by using pedal tones, a melodic device mastered by Bach. A pedal note is simple a sustained or continously repeated note.

For those of you who might find it difficult to grasp the idea, a pedal tone is simply a small scalar pattern which you beautify by changing certain notes, and repeat. Although a repeated scalar pattern will sound boring, the “pedal effect” makes this sound so fuckin awesome! Think of a a simple guitar chord being plucked and a single bass note being played in the background. If the bass note keeps changing, the  structure of the melody does not change, but you end up with  the whole “pedal effect”. These changes can deeply improve the mood of your melodies.

You can check out the pedal tones that Malmsteen uses most frequently on that image. Make sure to zoom and sharpen the image.

Now, I’m going to share a few pedal tones that I use. Let’s start with a simple one:

See how changing the G-flat note to G changes the melody? Keep playing it continuously. Now, try making changing that note to something else, in the major scale.

Now take a look at the pattern below. Changing the C to B makes that awesome mood change. Again, try incorporating other notes from the same scale. You can see that this pattern requires quite a big stretch. Stop if your fingers hurt. Start slow with a metronome, then progress.

The pedal tone below is probably the most interesting to me, because it incorporates string skipping right into the melody. You could go on and play all the notes in the scale successively. This type of melody is very prominent is most of Bach’s compositions.

Both the pictures below show part of the same melody. Go ahead, try playing it. See how great it sounds? There are no note changes here, except that the same pattern is repeated whole notes down in a successive fashion. Try playing it downwards from the neck, it sounds great that way too.

If you’ve actually taken time to play the patterns, you’ll notice a few things. Firstly, all these melodies require full attention from all four of your fingers. Therefore, guitarists who start out learning the wrong way to fret are going to have a problem with this. Always play with your fingers perpendicular to the fretboard. That way, your fingers have the maximum reach necessary to unleash these licks. Not only will bending your fingers hurt and ultimately force you to give up, it will hold you back from gaining the maximum speed at which you can play.

Secondly, start out slow. I realise that you may want to play fast licks right when you start playing or taking lessons, but that’s going to hamper your skills in the long-run. Patience is very important, and it means having to let your fingers shape their own pace. Start at 60 bpm on a metronome(use gstick or tuxguitar if you don’t have a real metronome), play a melody about 20 times, shift to 64 bpm and play 20 more times. Keep adding 4 bpm and playing each pattern 20 times until you reach your maximum speed. Do this for about 2 hours, taking breaks every 40 minutes.

Another thing worth noting is that all these patterns make use of alternate picking. If you’re playing with downstrokes or upstrokes successively, you’re doing it wrong. Alternate picking means strictly upstrokes followed by downstrokes or vice versa. Practice alternate picking, and chromatic picking will help you a lot, but that’s going to be a subject of another post.

Finally, listen to classical music. Rock/metal music is limited in the sense that it’s impossible to capture all the instruments available in a symphony. To deal with this, as a guitarist, you must find creative ways to deal with this. Which means, using techniques such as pedal tones to beautify and multi-linearise your melodies.

I hope these patterns inspire you enough to challenge yourself to play neoclassical metal. If you already knew all this, good for you. Watch out for more advanced stuff in the future. Oh and by the way, my sound card is screwed up, otherwise I would’ve uploaded audio. Sigh.

Feel free to comment and send me mail about any thoughts/questions you might have.