The Guitar Player's Resource
Welcome back! In this lesson I will be showing you a few excerpts from my latest album, "Chapters". This album has 15 new tracks and it is 67 minutes long and it is chock full of guitar work. This is mainly an acoustic album with a little bit of electric guitar mixed in to add to the expression.
Since there is a lot of music on this album, in this lesson I will just show you a few short snippets from some songs. These examples I will be teaching you will be mainly technique based, and they are excerpts that may stand out in a track during a lead or a solo.
It would be great to pick out a lot more examples and even transcribe complete tunes. For future lessons, I will be covering more techniques I used on "Chapters". Let's dig in...
The first tune we will look at for Example 1 is track 2, "You Take My Breath Away". This song has a lot of guitar parts that I could teach you, but I will just give you a couple of technical examples in the guitar solo that can help your technique.
At the top of the solo at about (3:09), there is a fast, 4 note sequential line on one string that falls in the C Mixolydian mode (C, D, E, F, G, A, Bb). This 4 note sequence climbs up the high E string very quickly and then in the last bar, a 6 note, 2 string phrase closes out the line.
MP3 - Technical Muscial Examples - Example 1 - Fast/Solo
MP3 - Technical Muscial Examples - Example 1 - Fast/Slow
Example 2 is another section from the solo for "You Take My Breath Away" and this is at about (3:24). We are still in C Mixolydian like the previous example and the repeated phrase in the first couple bars can be a great picking exercise on its own.
MP3 - Technical Muscial Examples - Example 2 - Fast With Track
MP3 - Technical Muscial Examples - Example 2 - Fast/Slow
Example 3 is a brief excerpt from track 3, "Capriccio Di Parma", at about (1:24). This tune has lots of great sections to it and if I taught you all of them, it would be many pages long. But, we will focus on the arpeggio section at (1:24), which is cool section. The first arpeggio on beat 1, is an E with an added #5 and you can also call it a b6, (E, G#, B, C) and then a E7 arpeggio, (E, G#, B, D). After beat 3, in the first bar it briefly branches to a, G# dim7th arpeggio (G#, B, D, F) and then back to the E and E7 with the #5. Beginning at beat 3 in bar 3 and continuing to the last bar, we play the G# dim7th arp and then up a minor 3rd to a B dim7th (B, D, F, Ab). The very last beat finishes with a E augmented arpeggio, (E, G#, B#).
MP3 - Technical Muscial Examples - Example 3 - Fast With Track
MP3 - Technical Muscial Examples - Example 3 - Fast/Slow
OK, that is it for this lesson! Be sure to visit www.mikecampese.com to check out
the "Chapters" album and to purchase it as well as other merchandise.
Mike Campese is an all-around music performer, session artist and teacher competent in many musical styles, electric and acoustic. He has studied at G.I.T. (Honors Graduate), and with Paul Gilbert, Norman Brown, Stanley Jordan, Scott Henderson and Keith Wyatt.
