As modern shred guitar has evolved to embrace a wide variety of left and right hand echniques, so has there been a parallel tendency to segregate these techniques on a lick-by-lick basis. As a result, in a typical modern shred solo, you'll find that certain licks are alternate picking licks, certain licks are legato licks, certain licks are sweep licks, and so on. This overly mechanical approach is probably the result of the significant amount of time players spend practicing techniques separately, as a means of simplifying the learning process.

Yngwie on the other hand exhibits no such compartmentalism. The best example yet of the multitechnical -- or as I like to call it, multitextural -- nature of Yngwie's playing occurs in the next lick of the Now Your Ships Are Burned solo. It's a terror of a descending scale run, filled with odd-numbered sequences, slides, and even a few repeated notes. In keeping with our theme of minimal scale positions, it's based entirely on the "A" fingering:
The lick begins with one of Yngwie's trademark swoopy turns of rubato phrasing: As a former Italian major, I can tell you that rubato means stolen. And what's being stolen here is time. In musical terms, this means starting a passage a little early and taking your time to speed up to the tempo of the piece. The victim of the theft is the previous measure, from which Yngwie steals half a beat. He does this by hitting the first bent note of the lick, the 22nd fret of the E string, on the 4-& of the previous measure. Since Now Your Ships Are Burned is in 4/4, this gives him an eighth note head start on the current phrase. The rubato continues throughout the ensuing descending-ascending seconds (a motif that should look familiar by now). By the time Yngwie excutes the last pair of seconds, he's already up to speed.

The rest of the lick is nothing we haven't seen before in our examination of Yngwie's multitextural playing. Just a whole lot faster. What is new about this lick is its overall sound. Although it looks somewhat random and complex on paper, when played fast, a decidedly sequenced sound starts to emerge. At first, it sounds like it's going to be a descending fours lick: Sort of. The first part of the run, measure 12a, is a brief ascending scalar pickup used by Yngwie to introduce the descending part of the lick. Measure 12b follows with two sequences of actual descending fours, explaining why we heard what we thought we heard. So far, so good. But measure 12c breaks the pattern altogether in a seemingly nonsensical way by using two repeated notes on the E string. What's going on here?

The concept of using a brief ascending scalar pickup to introduce a largely descending scalar sequence is common in shred. Michael Angelo frequently does so in his descending fours work: Although the Angelo lick above uses a different key and scale than the excerpt of the descending terror lick we're comparing it to, the fretboard shape is actually the same. (Guitarists inventing licks based on shapes? Never!) When Mike executes the first string change of the lick, from the 15th fret of the G to the 12th fret of the B, he does so via alternate picking. But you'll notice that when Yngwie does the same thing from the B to E strings, he uses sweeping: The second difference between Yngwie's approach and Mike's approach involves the number of notes in the pickup itself. Rather than ascending smoothly through the E minor scale, Yngwie actually skips what would be the fifth note of the lick, the scale degree on the 19th fret of the E string. The lick proceeds directly from the 17th fret of the E string to the 20th fret of the E string, and the resulting pickup in measure 12a is four notes long. On the other hand, if we look at Mike's lick, we find no such omission: Mike's pickup has five notes because it ascends the scale (E Dorian in this case) without skipping any notes. So why the missing note when Yngwie does it? Why, to set up another sweep, of course: The missing note on the E string causes the string change from the 17th fret of the E string to the 20th fret of the B string to be an upstroke. This makes the 20th fret of the B string a downstroke, perfect for sweeping back to the E string. If Yngwie had played all the notes in the pickup, his sweep from the B to the E strings would have caused the the pickstrokes to be reversed, and the second sweep would have been impossible. In other words, the use of the first sweep is what required the omission of the note to set up the second sweep.

The final oddity of the lick occurs back on the E string, where the 17th fret is actually repeated twice: This is not a typo, and it's not a mistake. The double note on the 17th fret is completely intentional. It is, if you will, the mathematical "remainder" of the missing note earlier in the lick. Kind of like fixing the error in the Matrix, doubling the 17th fret balances the mismatched number of upstrokes and downstrokes so that the entire lick comes to rest again on a downstroke at the 17th fret of the B string in measure 13. Having worked out the lick's pick structure so that it ends on the same pickstroke that it starts with, Yngwie can actually repeat the lick indefinitely if he wanted: Brilliant! This lick is perhaps the quintessential example of Yngwie's little-understood combination of alternate picking and sweeping. It makes a great exercise for practicing the Yngwie style, and it also sounds really cool when you get it going -- something you should insist on in all your practice licks.

Btw, when Yngwie really plays descending fours, he does so in a unique way -- on a single string: The example above is an awesome stop-time run which occurs at 3:37 of Now Your Ships Are Burned, during the second guitar solo. Although the ascending scalar pickup in the first measure still contains a sweep, notice that Yngwie does not omit the 19th fret of the E string as he did in the descending terror lick. As a result, the pickup now contains a full five notes, just like the Michael Angelo descending fours lick we examined. The rationale again, like so many elements of Yngwie's picking technique, goes back to sweeping -- or in this case, the absence of sweeping. Because Yngwie is no longer attempting to set up a sweep on the B string, he needn't omit the 19th fret. Instead, he'd like to set up the descending fours so that they start on downstrokes, which is a natural way to think of this kind of pattern. Thanks to the sweep between the B and E strings, this is exactly what happens. Starting in measure 2, he simply repeats the familiar four-note, first-finger slide pattern which we've already studied, allowing the slide to drop the hand one position each time the sequence repeats. I've notated explicit fingerings to highlight the slides.

A generation of guitarists was fooled into practicing intricate, multi-string descending fours patterns because they thought that's what they were hearing on Yngwie records. Even the tablature to Yngwie's own 1991 REH instructional video made this mistake. (REH videos were generally not transcribed by the artists themselves, and the resulting tabs were typically atrocious.) The truth is that a number of Yngwie's trademark licks can be played relatively easily because they do not involve switching strings at all. Descending fours is one of them.

Having come this far, you're more than prepared with the knowledge you'll need to tackle the rest of the descending terror lick. More importantly, what you've come to recognize is that Yngwie's picking style is anything but a brutish display of athleticism. It is instead a finely engineered combination of techniques centered around, and enabled by, Yngwie's love of the sweep.

If you think this kind of stuff is cool, there's even more to the story. Cracking the Code will divulge through video analysis the deeper rationale behind Yngwie's unusual picking formula.