MEGADETH Guitarist Talks Technique In Interview

Andy Aledort of GuitarWorld.com conducted an interview with MEGADETH guitarist Chris Broderick. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

GuitarWorld.com: Now that you are in MEGADETH, do you have time to work on your classical playing or are you playing mostly electric?

Chris: Lately, the pull has definitely been to the electric guitar, and, unfortunately, my classical guitar has been a little neglected. It's got some dust collecting on it, and I really feel bad about that, because classical guitar is a passion of mine as well. But, like I said earlier, I know that, when I get the time, I'll just be on a porch relaxing, playing classical and flamenco music on the guitar. I might even pick the violin back up and scare some cats away with it.

GuitarWorld.com: For guitar players that have diverse musical interests such as yourself, what would you recommend as a good practice approach?

Chris: I think you need to focus on your priorities and realize that there are all of these different things that you want to learn, and as you go through all of the things that make you want to play the instrument, you will hopefully get to everything in due time. To me, having the desire is the best way to grow on the instrument. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to focus on learning all of my chord inversions, playing through all the chord voicings of, say, Fmaj7, like this. I'd do all four inversions with the piano voicing, all four inversions closed voicing, and so on, and then a week later I couldn't remember any of it. But if you apply that approach to a jazz standard and you try to utilize those inversions, it will stick with you, because you are studying those concepts within the context of a piece of music. That's a much more desirable way to address it than just running through a series of inversions.

GuitarWorld.com: On your current tour with MEGADETH, the band is celebrating the 20th anniversary of "Rust In Peace", which featured the guitar work of Marty Friedman. During the performances, how close do you stick to Marty's original guitar parts and solos?

Chris: I'm sticking as close as I possibly can. When I'm working on learning a specific riff or part, the first thing I look at are the techniques involved in recreating some of the crazy things that happen on the fretboard, and I play these parts really slowly for a long time. To me, if you try to bring a difficult passage up to tempo in haste, that will only serve to build stress into your playing, which is something that I definitely do not want. I am very meticulous about trying to get the solos that I transcribe, sonically speaking, as accurate as possible. I have never seen Marty play most of these solos, so I might play some of the licks in a different position than he did. But when I play along to the CDs, I try to make it so that it sounds as locked in and as tight as it can be. From there, I just try to have some fun with it, too. A great example is the first distorted solo from "Holy Wars". I love the way the solo kicks off, in terms of the changes in tonality from G major to Bf major. Once I learned the phrases, it was my goal to find the best way to make those musical phrases come to life. It begins with 16th notes and then quickly shifts to 16th-note triplets or sextuplets. The solo then shifts to G minor pentatonic and a Gm9 reverse arpeggio, followed by ascending octaves and ending with a cool G blues scale riff.

Read the entire interview from GuitarWorld.com.