We explore Yngwie’s ingenious system for integrating alternate picking and sweeping via downward pickslanting, and unlock his asymmetrical one-way pickslanting formula — among the most powerful picking strategies ever devised.
If the secret sauce of a liberal education could be boiled down to one ingredient, it wouldn’t be humanities, and it wouldn’t even be beer. (Though a case could be made for sweatpants.) No, the ultimate enabler of the examined life would have to be none other than the singular catalyst of all great ideas since Pythagoras quit his day job at Dairy Queen: free time.
In the summer of 1991, Professor Malmsteen brought his medieval music appreciation class to VCRs everywhere. While pre-med students were busy pipetting their titrations, language majors, with only verbs to conjugate and almost no papers to write, were glued to their cathode ray tubes in an effort to deduce just what the good professor was trying to say.
The path of discovery is less a gradual slog than a punctuated equilibrium of sudden insights. A chance meeting of CPU and sound had turned a toy synthesizer into the ultimate musical x-ray. Like a glass-bottom boat, it opened a window on a world that had existed only in imagination.
But as the pile of data grew, so did the frustration. Peeling back the armor of the guitar colossi only revealed even more complex rigging underneath. Rock videos and record collections had failed to provide all the answers. And this felt like a defeat. But that’s only because they had taken us as far as they could go. What we really needed now was a change of scenery.
March of 1986 saw the debut of the film Crossroads, for which Steve wrote and performed both the rock and neoclassical sequences of the now-famous guitar duel, and in which he also landed a starring role as the devil’s swaggering henchman, Jack Butler.
Trailer clips of the film’s climactic musical showdown, with its mesmerizing cascade of diminished arpeggios, had just begun to explode adolescent minds across the country when David Lee Roth stepped into the studio with Steve to record his highly anticipated post-Van Halen grudge album.
In this video, and our Crossroads Intimidation lesson, we take a look at a few of the film’s iconic guitar moments: those glittering diminished arpeggios, the devastatingly intimidating scale run that beings the duel, classic Vai-style pentatonic pull-offs, and more.
