We invited the Tennessee-born guitar virtuoso to share key aspects of his style by taking a solo over Jason’s new rock track, Alright Already! Jon Bishop is your guide.
This month we welcome rock guitar virtuoso Andy Wood who has filmed a lead performance and then an in-depth discussion for Alright Already!, a piece written especially for him by Jason Sidwell. With a moderate tempo of 114bpm, this rock track is largely based in F# Minor with a middle section based in Eb Major. With jaw-dropping licks, stunning speed lines and tasteful phrasing, you’re in for an exclusive masterclass of brilliant rock soloing.
Andy created his solo by taking a mostly improvised approach, but there are a few set ideas that were planned out first. Starting with Jason’s fast F# Minor Pentatonic riff, Andy stays out of the way by playing a pre-composed melody. Through a process of jamming over the verse groove Andy settled on a melody that he liked. This precomposed route is a good strategy when navigating sections in a musical way, as the motif can be repeated and developed further down the line. It’s a classic way to get more mileage out of an idea and provide something for listeners to latch onto.
The verse is in the key of F# Minor so the F# Minor Pentatonic scale (F#-A-B-C#-E) is a solid home base with F# Natural Minor (F#-G#-A-B-C#-D-E) being a good choice for more intricate ideas.
Andy uses plenty of advanced techniques to create ear-grabbing moments in the solo. There is vibrant use of artificial harmonics (picking hand plays 12 frets above what the fretting hand is doing) and a monster two-handed tapping lick to learn. Andy explains how to approach these ideas in detail in the video, and we have taken the liberty of providing extra tabbed examples for his video demonstrations.
The chorus changes gear into the relative Major key of A so all of the F# Minor fingerings will still work. The chromatic chord of G5 is included here and Andy stresses the importance of outlining this by including the G Natural note in his lines at the appropriate points.
The middle section pivots into the key of Eb Major so the Eb Major scale can be used (Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb-C-D) There are cool sounding tips of the hat to players like Eric Johnson here with the use of artificial harmonics and open-voiced triads.
When the verse is repeated Andy treats it as a memorable part of the tune and takes the opportunity to restate the original verse motif. To keep things interesting, various aspects of the motif can be changed to provide variation and motivic development.
Andy demonstrates the method he used to create the super fast passage of notes that brings the track to a close, and we have tabbed this in example 7. There is a considerable amount to remember here so we��
