To suppress unwanted string noise, I advise you to palm mute the bottom three strings. In any case, strive to make the four notes of each arpeggio equal in volume. You could alternatively play the melody fingerstyle, using your thumb and middle finger to attack the outer notes, or employ hybrid picking (pick-and-fingers technique), which work equally well while offering subtle differences in tone. I had tried using straight flatpicking, à la Steve Morse or John Petrucci, but even that technique, with 16th notes, felt too arduous and strained at tempo, so I settled on the articulations shown, which you’ll notice include a ring-finger “hammer-on from nowhere” on the middle note of each arpeggio. So the stringed instruments in the original score are actually bowing 32nd notes, a feat requiring virtuosic technique at that tempo! I tried to emulate that technique and subtle effect by double picking, but with the guitar’s different tuning, all the string crossing and skipping involved and my limited chops, it was just too arduous for me to do, so I streamlined the line to straight 16th notes and, in so doing, decided to jack up the tempo slightly, to around 100 beats per minute, which felt like a better groove, or “pocket.”Īs you can see, my adaptation of the theme incorporates the use of both picked notes and legato phasing (hammer-ons and pull-offs), with only the notes on the outer strings being picked, using “outside the strings” picking, meaning a downstroke on the lowest string used, which is accented every time, creating a syncopated rhythmic motif within the unbroken 16th-note stream, and an upstroke on the highest string. Appears in the NBA 2K14 Next-Gen Intro video.This is analogous to what we call “double picking,” for which each melody note is repeated using down-up alternate picking.
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