If you want to learn classically rooted shred techniques, then there is surely no finer teacher than Yngwie Malmsteen. The Swedish maestro single-handedly invented the neoclassical shred movement with his debut album, Rising Force, in 1984.
Now Malmsteen has put together a tutorial series called – what else – MaestroClass with TrueFire in which he shares the techniques and lines behind 10 of his tracks, and we’ve got an exclusive preview of the performance clip for his masterpiece, Far Beyond the Sun.
Watching the video, it’s an astonishingly clean performance of a track that set a new template for complex lead work and, thanks to the multiple camera angles, you can get indecently close to every arpeggio, whammy dive and squealing bend.
Malmsteen maintains a lot of the rhythms from the song owe more than a little to Beethoven’s fifth, and mastering it will teach you a lot not just about shred, but also classical composition.
“I became an aficionado of Bach and Beethoven, but when I heard Paganini, that was the biggest moment,” he once told Guitarist.
“Nobody was playing those crazy arpeggios. Everybody was just playing the [pentatonic] box. But I wanted to play that shit on guitar.”
Elsewhere, the TrueFire session will break down the likes of Malmsteen’s Toccata, Top Down Foot Down, Blue, Trilogy, Fugue, No Rest for the Wicked, Blackstar, Badinere and Si Vis Pacem – all tabbed and notated to the videos.
“We are thrilled to welcome Yngwie to the TrueFire family with this release of MaestroClass,” says TrueFire’s statement. “[It is] his first-ever interactive video learning experience and indisputably the ‘ultimate’ neoclassical guitar masterclass.”
Malmsteen’s influence goes way beyond the shred world, too. In fact, just last week we caught Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo shredding a section of Far Beyond The Sun on Chris Shiflett’s podcast.
For more information, on Malmsteen’s MaestroClass, head to TrueFire.
