One of Yngwie's most well-known contributions to shred guitar is his formula for playing arpeggios on the first three strings. In the next section of the Now Your Ships Are Burned solo, Yngwie applies this formula to the diminished arpeggio, one of the most distinctive sounds in his repertoire. The basic gist involves fretting a chord across the first three strings, and moving that chord around to different positions on the neck: If you look carefully at the diminished break above, you'll see that the chord shape Yngwie uses for diminshed arpeggios is this:


Fretting this figure anywhere on the neck and strumming the first three strings of the guitar will produce the classic diminished sound. For example, positioning the shape at the fifth fret produces a D# diminished chord, because the lowest note in the chord (the 8th fret of the G string) is a D#: Technically we'd call this a D# diminished triad, because it's a diminished chord composed of three different notes -- D#, F#, and A. While this sounds fine by itself, we can exploit a unique property of diminished chords to create an even more interesting sound. That is, by sliding this shape up or down the neck three frets at a time, we can create a series of diminished chords which, together, make up one monster chord known as a diminished seventh, or dim7: We call this a diminished 7th not because there are seven notes in the chord, but because the highest and lowest notes in the chord's full form are seven scale tones apart. More importantly for this discussion, all seventh chords, diminished or otherwise, have only four different notes. So a seventh chord is really a triad plus one. If we replace the fret numbers in the above example with the note names, you'll see that there are only four different notes in the whole chord sequence -- d#, f#, a, and c: Eureka. Check the cool diagonal pattern which is developing, and you'll understand another common property of chords. That is, by rearranging the order of the notes in a chord, you can make the same exact chord in different locations on the fretboard. In music speak we call these new chords inversions, because they contain the same (or nearly the same) notes as the original chord, just in a different order. From a practical perspective, what this means is that inversions tend to have the same kind of sound as the original chord, just somewhat higher or lower depending upon whether you're sliding higher or lower on the neck. Their purpose is to enable you, the player, to get the same chord sound wherever it's most convenient.

The base chord in any series of inversions is called the root position. In the example above it's our fifth-fret fingering: Sliding our familiar shape up to the 8th fret mixes up the note order and produces a variant of the root position known as the first inversion: Sliding up to the 11th fret produces the second inversion: Since there are twelve frets in an octave, and since we're moving up the neck in units of three frets at a time, simple math tells us we can only get four total chords before things start repeating -- the root position, plus three inversions. Sure enough, sliding to the 14th fret gives us the third inversion: ...and sliding to the 17th fret brings us back to the root position, just one octave higher. Here's the whole sequence again: If this sounds kind of like the soundtrack to a silent movie, you're right. Diminshed 7th inversions are great for building tension, and were used frequently in olde-tyme filmmaking as the backing music for that scene where the rogue locomotive threatens to flatten the heroine. Sliding up and down through different inversions of a diminished 7th chord, whether on a guitar, piano, or with an orchestral string section, is a common device for ratcheting up this level of tension. The tension usually breaks at a moment of what musicologists call resolution -- the sonic equivalent of the hero leaping into the frame to rescue the leading lady.

Sixty years later, the diminished break in Now Your Ships Are Burned employs the same strategy of diminished tension and resolution. The lick moves through the inversions we just outlined: The first measure ratchets down through the inversions in a straight line: root, 3rd inversion, 2nd inversion, 1st inversion. The second measure hovers around the first inversion in stepwise motion: second inversion, first inversion, root, first inversion. This sets us up for the third measure, which finally resolves all this diminished tension as the lick returns to the home tonality of E minor.