Play God and become a G.O.A.T. with the technical and creative brilliance of Polyphia, with Charlie Griffiths as your guide.
Tim Henson is guitarist of the progressive metal band, Polyphia, who along with Scott LePage utilises complex guitar riffs, intricate rhythms, and innovative use of electronics and sound design, creating a unique blend of progressive metal, jazz, trap and K-pop music to create a distinctive and cutting-edge sound.
Born in 1993 in Texas, Tim started playing guitar at the age of 12 and now at the age of 29, is a highly respected musician whose playing style is characterised by a virtuosic technique and intricate, melodic playing. He is known for incorporating a wide range of musical influences and techniques into his playing, including hybrid picking, tapping, harmonics, sweep picking and jazzy chord progressions, to create a unique sound that is both technically impressive and emotionally rich. Their fourth and latest album Remember That You Will Die showcases this diversity with progressive pop songs like ABC, the alternative rock Bloodbath with Deftones’ Chino Moreno on vocals and the technical guitar display Ego Death featuring a guest spot from Steve Vai.
In this lesson we will use hybrid picking, sweep picking, natural harmonics and tapping to create unique licks and riffs.
The core of Tim’s playing is a hybrid picking technique, which means using a pick to play the lower strings and the second, third and fourth (marked as ‘m’, ‘a ‘and ‘c’ in the notation) to pluck the upper strings with a fingerstyle approach. Every example uses a hybrid picking element, but Ex 1 will act as an introduction to the technique if you are unfamiliar. The Polyphia sound uses fretted notes and open strings to create huge interval leaps, which are then pushed further with other techniques.
Ex 2 could be described as hybrid sweep picking and is performed with a downward pick sweep across the strings, with the highest note being played with a secondfinger pluck. This has an added possibility of creating a variety in timbre with palm muted sweep-picked notes, followed by a louder snappy final note. Ex 3 focuses on natural harmonics, which Polyphia use to create sudden, octave jumping interval skips. The key to clean harmonics is to position your finger directly over the fret-wire of the fret in question, unless you are searching for harmonics between the 1st and 3rd frets.
The final piece of the puzzle is tapping, with fingers of both hands. Rather than the Van Halen style arpeggio, or scale based tapping style, Tim uses picking-hand tapping to grab a single note or two here and there, to integrate the effect of a contrasting tapped note attack into a riff or a lick. We also have fretting-hand tapping (marked in the music as squares which are hammer-ons t
