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If "Six-Note Magic" was "My First '80's Hair Band Hit", then "Y is for
Yngwie" is "How to Train Your Dragon". Its technical elements build
on those of Six-Note Magic by combining the six-note chunked motif
with the descending Trilogy-shape scale run from "Black Star".
Thematically it is the counterpart to the Trilogy-inspired "P is for
Practice" song from Episode 4 of Season 1 -- except this time, instead
of teenage bedroom posing, we've brought real technical firepower to
the fight that actually works.
The Black Star lick makes four appearances here -- the first two of
which feature it unchanged from its stock form. The third, in measure
8, features a small but notable modification: the elimination of the
legato notes on the top string. As the voiceover in this part of the song
explains, this is done by simply starting the lick on an upstroke. This
causes the picking on the top string to finish on an upstroke, which
permits rapid and efficient string switching to the B string by way of
dwps.
In its final appearance, the Black Star lick joins forces with the six-note
pattern from "Six-Note Magic" to create a "monster lick" of
Malmsteenian proportions. In order to make this connection, we need
to make another small but emblematic alteration to the Black Star lick:
we need to introduce a legato note.
Instead, what we're doing is keeping the entire pattern intact, and
simply rushing its timing to fit it all in before the downbeat. This is a
distinctly Yngwie thing to do, and again flows from his preference for
idiosyncratic shapes. Unlike the shred players of the latter half of the
decade, who built entire vocabularies of metronomically regular
patterns, Yngwie's free-form scalar improvisation rarely snaps to the
grid. He tends to stick to his favorite fingerings, and massages them
clay-like to the time, rather than the other way around. This is a
historically guitaristic approach, similar to the way Eddie subverted
traditional pentatonic fingerings in often undetectable ways (a la
Season 1 Episode 4's "Space Blues" scene). And it's one of the
choices that gives Yngwie's playing an organic, soulful quality more
spiritually akin to blues than shred.
For the rest of the solo, the structure has been pared down to the
simplest possible technical elements. In fact, almost every note that's
not part of a high-speed showpiece is, in fact, just a downstroke. And
that's fine! All the classic YJM style cues are here: the dragon stomp
rhythm, the blockbuster melodic theme, the legato ornaments and
rubato timing. As in Yngwie's own playing, there's plenty of
expression available in terms of muting, vibrato, and harmonics, to
evoke the scandinavian mood in a fun way.
Finishing the Model