“Easy” solos with shreddy triplets#
March 22, 2023
Time to go into the some triplets based solos. Triplets Soloing! It seems examples of triplets are easier to be found than 16th grooves. So after a post on triplets rhythm, this time I want to dig some “easy” solos that are mostly triplets based. But before going to the list let’s step back into what “easy solo” means, my criteria, and the reason behind this list.
“Music” vs “exercise” I work a regular job and play in my spare time. If you are in a similar position and are a less nerdy than I am, you may say that practicing exercises is not what you want to do. Exercises may feel like more work you add on top on your regular job. Isn’t playing the guitar supposed to be fun? Ok, let’s assume that practicing exercises can not be your kind of thing if you only have 15 minutes a day or maybe every two days. Or if you can play only in the weekend.
Besides that, progress with exercises can take quite a lot to be harvested. So, well, you can even noodle or jam and have fun. Which is great. But maybe you also want to have some sort of plan about improving on something by playing music.
What alternatives do we have? On the one hand, exercises required commitment and job life is there. On the other hand, just playing for fun is great. But it goes nowhere and it is frustrating if your are having fun with the same four (power) chords and licks. Years doing things with guitar, always stuck at the same bpm and that Metropolis solo always as far away as the day we started!
Ok, let’s try this. The idea is two folded:
to carve our exercises out of music
to remember that you can use the exercises from point 1 as an entry point for more real music, i.e. you can graduate from the extrapolated exercises to the whole piece you took the exercises from
(bonus): you can actually simplify what you cannot play from a tune or what you like from a tune and build exercises out of it. This should allow you to play the whole tune.
The main reason for going that way is that we stay closer to music. And, if you are a jamming person, you can always play along the backing track of the tune that originated your exercises.
Yep, having super fun playing exercises that are also musical is hard. But we can use real music as Etude. At the end of the day, a lot of example solos in the books that sound good are complex because of at least two reasons:
impro books by top players have the top players/instructors playing. They are super talented as players (and most renewed instructors are hell of a players, think Don Mock). Impro players will have something peculiar, tone, phrasing, etc. So it will be music most of the time, even though didactic;
technique books by top players will have “sum it all” sections and demos. And they will most of the time be hard. There will be an extra tricky sneaky monster to challenge you. I’d like some slower challenges that sound good. But they are super hard.
And, most of the time, a super funny music book will not be actual music because… well, that is a technique book section. That’s not its point. You’ll some mechanics stuff in all techniques 🙂
(Yep, there are exceptions of pieces from lessons that kind of become pieces of its own. Maybe Blues Mutations are an example. Yet… there’s a lot more than technique in there and I suspect most of the “exercises canonized as music” are mostly phrasing and impro lessons, i.e. what is there closer to music.
The converse can also be the case. Some sections of technical pieces makes for a great exercise! And that is what we are looking for here. You want quintuplets and string skipping, of course Dream Theater are there to help you!
And, if you nail these half a minute passage you can have a lot of extra fun with the other 4 and more minutes! Here we want something easier, but that is the main idea.
(Nested parenthesis: you can even argue some super shreddy pieces are nothing but a collection of exercises with no soul in it. You’ll cast that as an argument against shred or technique in general. Or maybe simply to point out that some music can became formulaic. In the context of this post strategy this is also good news: we can use the easy structures and motive to dig more technique. Because, well, pieces with “arpeggio section” in the tab are often blazingly fast. Also, shred fests like No boundaries are great to show us different ways of technical playing. Then, assuming you can do that or something similar, it is up to you to always being speed killing it or not.))
Criteria for being easy Now that we have this idea of stealing exercises from artists that already made the effort to make technique musical, we need to find something we slow handers can play. Or, to use a more modern phrasing, we need something that goes at our step dad speed also on the original record (at least in theory).
Besides that, we need to agree on some criteria for being “easy”. I propose what follows:
the solo overall has no rhythmic complexity. Or the minimum allowed. Things start on beat 1, there are no Brett Garsed sneaky pauses, and no polyrhythms. Things are generally easy on that side. They might be fast(ish), but more or less it is all a matter of sitting down, practicing and playing along. And, given that it is almost all in the target division of study, if you want to use a metronome you can easily do that;
the outcome of the solo is in general playable. So it is not Erotomania solo (which has quintuplets and skips, so that is a way to rule it out already. Next time :D);
shapes are easy. No stretchy stuff or Scarified like arpeggio patterns. (Again, we can use a different post for that);
harmonies are easy-ish. Scale wise it is mostly a matter of modes. No harmonic minors and stretches;
no complex phrasing. This connects with the point of no complexity from the rhythmic side. But here it means that, in general, there will be no tricky bends, blue bends, etc. It is not that they are not important, but the idea is to focus on technique in musical ways.
Ok, it seems we have ruled out almost anything that can make music pleasant. What’s left?
A (Partial and Highly Subjective) List Avantasia – Avantasia
I loved the album when in secondary school, imagine 13 years old me discovering Kiske is still alive and kicking after Keeper of the seven keys…
This solo shows you what you can do with a few triads. Speed in the first arpeggios is quite high, ok. But you get a whole bar of repetitions. So, well, it is almost like an exercise.
Then I like how you burst and then slows in and out with other triads. This is a way to use musically the same pattern we use since Rock Discipline to try to play faster. And it can sound cool in a real tune!
Also, the descending arpeggio in groups of 3s is way more manageable than Malmsteen’s Arpeggios from Hell etude.
Really, this Avantasia solo can be conceived almost as a collage of exercises, but it sounds like music.
Avantasia – Sign of the Cross
They did that again!
This is like the companion of the other Avantasia solo. This time we get alternate picking and scales. There is a lot of single-string action. Then there is a 6 notes down, move a down a note, 6 notes up sequence.
The interesting part is that you can play this like 6 notes (3 notes, 3 notes) position swift 3 notes and 3 notes, keeping a 2 strings pattern. Or you can go on 3 strings without the position shift. A bit further in the solo, you get to do a similar thing. This time with a longer sequence. You can either shift or pick through 5 strings instead of 4.
Iron Maiden – I’m running free
You did not expect them here, right? Iron Maiden were a cornerstone of the other post on rhythms. Pick these triplets and have fun.
I like to consider this as an easier version of trilogy suite (LoL).
Further challenges? Assuming you had no problems with the other ones or want extra exercises, here is a small Children of Bodom based arpeggios mix.
Keep developing these sweeps on 3 strings with some pedal tones plus sweep with this intro.
Or maybe you want more even more strings sweeps like the Avantasia one.
You also have a more challenging one over 200 bpms. But it has not many long streams of triplets so you can rest. You can use Hatebreeder as a perfect piece to walk and run and use speed bursts.
By the way, check Black Widow solo starts to have some chromaticism at random that looks a lot like your exercises. Alexi had a special touch to turn exercises into something different.
Bonus: the album is quite a triplets heaven. And it has a triplets piece at 150 bpm which should belong to the previous post of triplets grooves.
(It also has the triplets with pentatonic and bends lick)
Random Staff Read (or added to the list) I started Pollan’s book on changing your mind. Looks super interesting so far.
Also, I am experiencing a different form of reading for the Fluent Python book (second edition). There is really a lot to unpack there
(With music based posts, I’ll skip the music in the background part).
See you around!