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Betcha Can't Play This: Doug Aldrich's Three-Octave Pentatonic

Ascent
By Doug Aldrich April 16, 2015 Magazine  

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This is a triplet-based run in A minor that starts out in the low register and moves up and across the
fretboard, spanning three octaves before settling into a single position and moving back across the
strings.

I’m using hammer-ons and pull-o s in combination with picking to achieve a fast stream of notes
that "pops" and ows. Each pair of triplets in bar 1 is played within a compact four-note shape that I
fret with my index and ring ngers.

When I get to the top two strings in bar 2, I continue the same phrasing approach and bring the
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pinkie into play to incorporate wide intervals and big fret-hand stretches and use quick position
 shifts to ascend the neck. On beat three of bar 2 I melodically outline a Gadd2 chord [G A B D], which
creates a nice sense of harmonic movement in an otherwise A minor pentatonic [A C D E G] tonality.

Once I get to the high A note at the 17th fret at the end of bar 2, I stay in the 14th-position A minor
pentatonic box pattern for the remainder of the lick and work my way back over to the low E string,
using double pull-o s in conjunction with chromatic passing tones at the 16th fret on the top two
strings.

At the end of bar 3, I play a Je Beck–inspired move, picking the C note at the 17th fret on the G string
followed by a big, one-and-one-half-step "over-bend" up to that same pitch from A, three frets lower,
pulling the string downward with my index nger.

I also do a little bit of string skipping to disguise the sound of the scale pattern, and I nish the lick by
adding the ninth, B, to the scale to suggest an A natural minor [A B C D E F G] sound. As I did with the
bend, I add vibrato to the nal note by pulling the string down, which is the only way to bend the low
E string.

Betcha Can't Play This with Whitesnake's Doug Aldrich #2

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