If there were an award for the most vicious moment in shred, I'd nominate this one. The opening statement of the solo pierces the stop-time silence like a knife: Make that two knives. The first half of the lick is a dagger-like legato flourish played in four different locations on the fretboard, spanning three octaves in all. The second half is a descending picked scale run that's like a broadsword, slicing the guitar in two. It also spans three octaves of fretboard real estate, from the fifteenth fret of the high E string, all the way down to the sixth fret of the A string. The juxtaposition of these two phrases is one of the most aggressive passages in Yngwie's entire catalog. It also encodes a great deal of information about Yngwie's unique style.

The "dagger" from which the first half of the lick is constructed is actually a fragment of an E harmonic minor scale: The dagger is really a simple descending scale with two twists. One twist is the addition of an extra note on the E string -- the 19th fret that begins the lick. It's a grace note, which means that metrically it actually has no duration. What this means in practice is that you'd play the grace note and quickly transition to the second note. The trick is that it needs to be done without altering the rhythm of the phrase.

To really hear this effect, imagine you repeated just the first three notes of the dagger, sans grace note, starting on quarter notes: Then we add the grace notes at the 19th fret, like so: In both cases, you can hear that the pattern starts squarely on the downbeats of the measure -- in other words, directly on the quarter note count. Technically this should not be possible in scenario two, because we've added an extra note and lengthened the phrase. In reality what's going on is that the grace note at the 19th fret is played directly on the quarter note, and the following note on the 20th fret is shortened by a hair to accommodate it. This keeps the other notes in their rightful places.

The net effect of using grace notes is that they soften the phrases to which you attach them, as slides frequently do. Note however the difference between a grace note and a slide. A grace note is a sound, whereas a slide is a motion. Grace notes can be played with slides, but they can also be fretted with separate fingers, as Yngwie does here. Yngwie almost always begins descending scale runs with a grace note. This attention to finesse is an Yngwie hallmark.

The next twist in the dagger happens on the B string, and it is in fact a slide. Note that the second half of the dagger is four notes long: Four-note-per-string licks present a problem, because such fingerings often feel awkward for the left hand. Yngwie avoids the problem entirely by using only three fingers to play the pattern. The 20th and 19th frets on the B string are played with the third and second fingers, respectively. He follows with the first-finger slide from the 17th to the 16th frets. Since the slide crosses adjacent frets, it sounds identical to a fretted note. The pinky is not used at all.

Yngwie uses many four-note-per-string licks in his playing, and he almost always does so by way of slides. Not only does this permit the use of comfortable three-note per string fingerings, but it also takes the speed burden off the fingers by using the motion of the hand to play the last note in the lick. As a result, watching Yngwie play is like a magic act. You often hear more notes than you see the fingers fretting. This is because the hand is actually doing some of the work by gliding along the fretboard. Which brings us to...

To complete the daggers lick, we simply repeat the dagger in four locations on the fretboard: This is tough to do for a couple reasons. One is finger speed. This is where the fingers of the left hand move quickly between various fretted notes, while the left hand itself remains stationary. We can experience finger speed by simply repeating the dagger in one position, minus the slide: Finger speed here is high but hand speed is essentially zero because the fretboard position is not changing. Hand speed is where the hand itself must slide along the neck while the fingers do relatively little work. Here's a skeletal version of the dagger lick consisting of only the position shifts: Distilling the daggers lick thusly, we can see that hand speed is high because the hand must slide across a large expanse of fretboard after every note. In fact, the total range is over one octave horizontally. Finger speed is zero in this case because it's a one-finger lick.

Ultimately, the issue with this part of the Now Your Ships Are Burned solo is that is requires finger and hand speed. Hand speed in particular is tough, since it requires you to watch the fretboard closely to make sure the position shifts are accurate. Running rapidly through the position shifts by themselves, using the above example as an exercise, is how I learned to do it. You'll want to use your second finger, since this is what you'd use in the full version of the lick. The payoff is that when you do begin practicing the full lick, the position shifts will feel accordingly slower. Eventually, your sense of fretboard geography will develop to the point where you can play it accurately without looking.

Even with practice, putting the hand and finger motions together at this tempo is a challenge. Now Your Ships Are Burned is played at approximately 140bpm, and the four daggers in each measure contain eight notes apiece (the grace note does have a duration, however small). This makes them 32nd notes. For those of you who practice with metronomes, this is equivalent to 16th notes at 280bpm. Now that's some fast guitar. Does Yngwie actually hit all those notes? Well, no, not really. But does he hit the ones that matter? You bet. Yngwie's ear, and our ears, tell us that a little slurring and sliding is not only acceptable, but can even add a sense of drama -- like a blurry action photo.

Finally, back in the finesse department, Yngwie adds just the slightest hint of pick harmonics to the grace note of each dagger. In Yngwie's recording, this is audible most clearly on daggers one and two, and maybe, if I use my imagination, on dagger four. As usual, finding the right spot to activate the harmonic takes a little trial and error. On the guitar I'm using in this lesson (a Washburn N2), that spot is somewhere near the neck edge of the bridge pickup:
The final phrase of the opening statement is a ferocious picking lick that contrasts spectacularly with the liquid tones of the preceding legato section. It starts at the 15th fret of the E string, and cuts a blistering staccato swath across five strings. It dips as low as the 6th fret of the A string before finishing with a shake on the 9th fret of the D: The first thing you'll notice about this lick is that it's not your ordinary three-note-per-string scale run. Look closer, and you'll see that it's actually a single pattern repeated in three octaves. The full three-octave pattern would be this: Three-octave patterns are reasonably common in shred as devices for traversing great fretboard distances. Many players have used them -- Paul Gilbert, Nuno Bettencourt, Richie Kotzen to name a few. Three-octave licks are usually recognizable by their omission of particular scale tones in the name of fingering simplicity. For example, here's a Nuno lick from Mutha (Don't Wanna Go to School Today): This lick is essentially an ascending E major scale with the sixth degree, c#, missing. This allows the left hand to use parallel fingerings on adjacent strings, making it easier to play. The gap in the scale during which the left hand leaps between the octaves (the measure divisions in the above example) is what identifies the lick to the ear as a repeating pattern. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a giveaway as to how the lick is played.

Yngwie's use of three-octave patterns in the sword lick is more subtle. By using four-note-per-string fingerings, he is able to form a complete harmonic minor scale with no omitted tones. The resulting sound is a seamless stream of notes which is very difficult to recognize audibly as any particular fingering. Like the dagger lick, Yngwie uses first-finger slides to enable the four-note-per-string sequences. The entire pattern is fretted with only three fingers:
One drawback to mixing four- and three-note-per-string fingerings like this is that it results in an odd number of notes for the total pattern -- seven. What this means is that if we use strict alternate picking, the pattern will begin on the opposite pickstroke each time we repeat it: While this is doable, it's difficult. In addition to focusing on playing cleanly, we now have to remember which pickstrokes we used for which repetition. It's like learning two wholly separate licks -- one that starts on an upstroke, and one that starts on a downstroke -- and playing them back to back.

Yngwie solves this problem by cleverly inserting a pull-off at the end of the pattern. As far as the right hand is concerned, the pattern now has six notes, and can always repeat on a downstroke: While a pull-off will certainly have a different sound than a picked note, several factors minimize how noticeable this is. One is the frugal use of this technique. Except for the legato flourish at the end of the sword lick, there are only two pull-offs in the whole passage. Two pull-offs intermingled with 16 picked notes will not create an overly legato sound. Second is the odd number of notes in the sword pattern. This ensures that the pull-offs will not occur at regular metric intervals, which confuses the ear and makes the pull-offs much harder to hear. The third piece of camouflage is the generally fast tempo at which the pull-offs are played. The fourth and final element of disguise is that pull-offs themselves can sound reasonably similar to picked notes if the finger gets a good pluck on the string. I have a feeling that Yngwie's scalloped fretboard contributes to this effect.

That said, the use of pull-offs in Yngwie's picked scale playing is audible in the general sense that it makes him sound different than other players. Those that gained fame in Yngwie's titanic wake, like Paul Gilbert and Vinnie Moore, had clearly spent lots of time perfecting uniformly alternate-picked three-note-per-string passages -- probably because that's what they thought they were hearing on Yngwie records. But the pristine regularity of alternate picking gave their scale playing a mechanical vibe that is generally not present in Yngwie's work. By contrast I like to think of Yngwie's sound as multitextural, where various notes in a particular lick receive various pick treatments, be they upstroke, downstroke, sweep, or legato. While the ear may not necessarily be able to separate the picked notes from the legato notes at speed, the overall effect is that of textural complexity.

Another great example of Yngwie's multitextural scale playing occurs as a stop-time fill at 2:42 of Now Your Ships Are Burned. Like the sword, it's also a descending E harmonic minor scale: Note the pull-offs on the G and D strings. At the speeds at which this lick is usually played, they're not so much overtly audible as they are merely textural components of the resulting sound. Note also the four-note-per-string sequence on the B string -- this is enabled, as usual, by a first-finger slide. Finally, note that the dagger lick is nothing more than the first two strings of this scale.

Both the sword lick and this stop-time fill are two of the most common scale shapes in all of Yngwie's playing. The fingering from the fill is actually the more common of the two, occurring in countless solos and licks, and even as the basis for entire songs (notably in Black Star, where it forms part of the main theme). In fact, these two harmonic minor shapes occur so frequently as the building blocks of Yngwie's improvisational exploits, that I have taken to calling them simply "A" and "B": How ironic that the guy who motivated a generation of guitarists to memorize dozens of scale patterns all over the neck plays 90% of his solos using just these two. They are the only scale patterns necessary in Now Your Ships Are Burned, and we'll see them both several more times before the solo is finished.