Let's take a deeper look at some of Dimebag Darrell's techniques and licks to help us understand how he plays, and be able to use these skills in our own improvisation. We cover whammy bar usage, chromatics, inverted powerchords and more!
Using the whammy bar is a massive part of the Dimebag sound, and an especially common thing to hear is natural harmonics with crazy whammy fun. So, where do we find these harmonics? Well, some of the most common places are shown on the fretboard below. Some are harder to find than others, but Dion guides you through it in the video! A very cool tip is that you can often find two different harmonics on one fret. Try the 4th fret, G string in the first half and second half of the fret... How cool is that? You can find more harmonics than shown in the fretboard diagram, but these are common places to find them!
The idea behind this lick, and this approach is to take a basic blues scale, or pentatonic scale and add in the chromatic note just before the root note. The chromatic note functions as an out note that adds tension, which is immediately resolved to the root of the key. It's almost like using the harmonic minor scale, except you just take the major 7th and add it to your blues or pentatonic scale. The scale Dion used for the lick, as well as the E blues scale & E harmonic minor scale, can be found in the fretboard diagrams.
The idea here is to bend unusual notes within your licks. In this lick example, we are taking the 15th fret of the G string and bending up a semitone to the 16th fret. This sounds cool because you are bending the b5th from the blues scale, which is already an 'out' note. This is a classic Dimebag style sound and something that can really spice up your playing all over the fretboard. Check out the tab for the lick.
An inverted powerchord is the simple process of taking a regular powerchord, which contains the root and 5th of the scale, and adding the 5th below the root as well as above. It massively 'chunks up' your powerchord and is very easy to play! The powerchord shapes can be found in the fretboard diagrams. A simple tab of the riff that Dion played in the video is also available to take a look at.
All we are doing here is taking the same pattern and moving it across all 6 strings... Hence 'symmetrical'! This produces a pretty crazy sound, but one that Dimebag uses a lot! The whole purpose of the lick is to create a lot of tension before hitting the high E (root note) and resolving the note. These style licks are definitely best played fast as there are a lot of notes that are out of the scale, so the quicker you get to the resolve, the more chance you have of pulling it off!
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