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Metal Essentials

Guitar Skills

Difficulty

Intermediate

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Introduction

Turn up the gain and get heavy

Welcome to the Metal Essentials Level One course, a comprehensive venture into the world of metal guitar, expertly guided by YGA tutor Dion. This course is for anyone wanting to get into the genre's theory and techniques. It's not just for metal lovers; it's for anyone looking to develop exciting guitar skills. Throughout the course, your technique, speed, and endurance will be dialed up. You'll explore new modes and scales applicable that just sound perfect for metal. This course is an essential journey for all guitarists, enhancing your skills, no matter your preferred genre.

We'll be delivering one of the darkest, coolest sounding solos you've ever played!

Dion Rushe

Join the dark side!

The Metal Essentials course begins with a primer, covering key differences in playing metal guitar, from high-gain amp settings to hand positioning. You'll dive into down-picking, palm muting, and accenting techniques. Unit 2 introduces an epic metal solo, touching on modal theory, tritone chord progressions, and the phrygian mode. Unit 3 elevates the rhythm side, focusing on down-picking and accenting with a quicker pace. In the final unit, you'll level up by playing in drop D and mastering add nine chords and pinched harmonics. After this course you'll possess enhanced skills and techniques and a deeper understanding of the metal!

Featuring:

22 HD videos

Full lesson notes

Backing tracks

Supporting diagrams

Interactive guitar tab

This course includes the following 5 units:

Unit 1

Metal Primer

Before we properly start the course, it is important to cover some key metal concepts regarding the technique and sound you will want to start developing.

Lesson 1Basics

Lesson 2Gear

Unit 2

Down-Picking

We'll be starting by looking at a cool rhythm track that will help you get to grips with the concept of down picking. This is simply the technique of playing everything with downstrokes.

Lesson 1Section A

Lesson 2Section A Continued

Lesson 3Section B

Lesson 4Down Picking

Lesson 5Triplet Exercise

Unit 3

Metal Soloing!

It's now time to get to grips with our first metal solo! It has to be said that riffing and rhythm playing is the core part of the metal genre, but there are also plenty of fantastic lead guitar parts to work with.

Lesson 1Lick 1 & 2

Lesson 2Lick 3 & 4

Lesson 3Lick 5 & 6

Lesson 4Lick 7 & 8

Lesson 5Sequencing

Unit 4

Inverted Metal

We take things up a serious rhythm notch in this unit, and our main two focuses are developing faster picking techniques and learning to play inverted powerchords.

Lesson 1Inverted Powerchord

Lesson 2Continued...

Lesson 3Accenting

Lesson 4Harmonic Minor

Lesson 5Checklist

Unit 5

Dropping The D

For our final unit we will once again take things up another notch, and teach you two of the most well-known techniques in metal: Drop D tuning & pinched harmonics!

Lesson 1Getting Ready

Lesson 2Section A

Lesson 3Add9 Chords

Lesson 4Section B

Lesson 5Putting It Together

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What you get

Whether you buy or subscribe, you'll get full online access to this course – Metal Essentials – complete with ad-free video lessons, interactive tab, audio tracks, progress tracking and more.

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Beautiful workbook

Course workbook

Every downloadable course includes a detailed workbook, written to work as a standalone study guide, as well as support the main videos.

*the PDF workbook is only available with the download of the course.

Everything you need

Choose to either purchase this single course, or subscribe and open up access to all of our courses. We've broken down the options below.

Full Video Lessons

HD, multi-camera, professionally filmed video lessons to show you the way with crystal clarity.

Backing Tracks

You'll have every single backing track and jam track for every single course.

Interactive Tab

Tab that moves along with the music! Slow down, loop and speed train with this interface.

Subscribe for all the perks

With a subscription, you'll also get access to all of our other great courses, as well as a learning pathway to supercharge your playing.

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