Mick Priestley’s Axe Attack 4
Written by Mick Priestley
Sunday, 23 September 2012 04:00
THE FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLEBEE
Has it been a month already? My oh my how the time flies … anyway – if my memory serves me correctly I was planning on a legato-fest this month, but I’ve changed my mind. Here’s what we’re gonna do instead – I’m gonna throw you right into the deep end with an alternate picking super-speed nightmare – The Flight Of The Bumblebee. It’s originally a classical piece, written by a dude called Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1899. Since then, it’s been played on just about every possible type of instrument, in every imaginable arrangement, and is mainly recognized for its speed.
If you’re somewhat of a speed-playing buff, you’ll inevitably have heard this piece already. It sits in the top drawer of guitar workouts with Steve Vai’s variation of Paganini’s 5th for ‘Eugene’s Trick Bag’ as something of a legendary (and super-difficult) piece of speed playing.
Now usually, the correct tab for this is hard to find, which means you’d beforced to buy it for about 8 quid and painstakingly tab out the notation….but fear ye not! I’ve tabbed the whole thing for you and you can have it for free – just tell people where you got it!
Now here’s the technique – the WHOLE thing, apart from the descending run right at the very beginning, is played using alternate picking. For those who have been living in a cave on the moon since guitar playing began, that means you’re gonna pick DOWN, then UP, then DOWN, in an alternating fashion. Keep a good grip on the pick, and you wanna start this real slow. Playing it isn’t too hard, memorizing it all is, and playing it at the correct (warp) speed is going to be a challenge. I found when I recorded it that I could have gone slightly faster (from 185bpm to 195) … except it made the big run at the end sound like a mess. I started out at 100bpm (get your metronome out) and there’s no other thing for it – just start with it slow, and when it sounds cool (all the notes are the same length and volume, and played as well as you can), stick an extra 10bpm on. Make sure you’re catching the string with the very tip of the pick only … and make sure it’s a firm pick – something like a Dunlop Jazz3 (NOTE – I’m not endorsed by Jim Dunlop. Take my word for it!) Here’s the bits to watch out for in particular:
1 – The very beginning! I’m tapping this whole thing here. Tap the first note, pull off the next three, then move to the next position. It’s the same pattern all the way, but a bit of a fiddle to get sounding smooth. The overwhelming majority of people play this alternate picked too, and pick every note, but I thought it sounded better this way. Jennifer Batten has a Bumblebee recording where the entire thing is tapped. I’d go for the tapping…feel free to pick it if it’s easier for you.
Once you’ve got the intro run out of the way, if you can get bars 4-7sounding decent then you’ve pretty much got the technique down – if you can make it sound cool to here, you shouldn’t have TOO MUCH grief with the rest of it. It’s just a practice thing. If it sounds like crap, take some speed off your metronome and go through it slower! REMEMBER – up, down. Up, down. All the way through the entire piece. Make sure your hands are perfectly in sync – there’s nothing wrong with doing it mega-slow at first. That’s what everyone does, including your all-time guitar hero.
IMPORTANT – Don’t even think about just bashing through this in one go and hoping some miracle will have you master it all. Break it up into bits- i.e. bits of 2 or 3 bars, and play them on repeat along to your metronome (which shouldn’t be set higher than 100bpm when you first try to play this). When you can master one small bit, it’s just a case of remembering where all the notes are after that – the big trouble is getting such speed down accurately between your right and left hands. If you can manage that for two bars, you’ve got the piece nailed – just work on your stamina! The heavier your strings are (I’m using 9s), the more you’re gonna feel the burn in your fretting hand.
2 – Bars 28-30
I’ll level with you – it took me forever to transcribe this and to my ear, the majority of this piece sounds its best at around the 5th fret sorta position. This run, however, is best to play here, and I wasn’t gonna retab the whole thing so I stuck this run in on a second guitar, because there’s a bit of an overlap anyway. I think I’m actually playing a slightly different run too. I think it was of those cases where I learned it the wrong way, thinking it was the right way, and only realized when I dug the notation out. Doesn’t much matter though – playing it live as written here, you can still pull it off, but you gotta be quick! Feel free to alter the tab if you want to, to get into this run easier, but remember that the note you’re ending the run on is on the same beat as where the ‘melody’ (main riff) comes back in. Playing this live, miss the high note at the top of the run and plunge back into the main riff. I’m pretty sure that on the original, it’s a piccolo or something plays that run anyway – the whole piece isn’t originally intended for one instrument alone.
3 – Bars 38-46
This is a fiddle – because suddenly the notes aren’t all the same length! Listen to the recording (it might not help you much at that speed though, so youtube the original and hear some geezer do it on the violin at a more sensible speed if you’re a big girl!)…and pay attention! Those awkward notes are twice the length of what you’re used to at this point – so try and soak that into your brain, and hear what it’s gonna sound like before you play it, if you see what I mean.
4 – Bars 49-End
As with all good classical pieces, the most stupidly difficult bit is at the end. What I’m talking about here is the run that start 5-6-5 on the Bstring, with the stabs behind it. You’ll see what I mean. Suddenly the pattern changes for this, so make sure this is another one of those sections you’ve ‘isolated’ when you’re practicing!
Make no mistakes about it, this is a HARD piece of guitar playing – made only harder to master by being entirely chromatic, and at ridiculous speed…it’s very easy to get fed up of it and quit because until you can play it at a good speed, it’ll sound absolutely hideous! Even the backing track sounds bizarre TO THE MAX until it’s at full speed. You’ll have to stick with it, and TRUST ME that this IS the right tab, and you can make it sound good. When something’s played at this speed, it’s quite easy to try the tab, and decide it’s wrong because it doesn’t sound right. I absolutely promise, 100%, that the tab I’ve provided for you here is absolutely bang-on, and IS what I’m playing on the recording. With enough practice you can do it without thinking about it – it’s just a case of doing it enough times that your fingers do what you want them to do without you even thinking about it.
So I’ll see you next month if you’ve got any fingers left! Please feel free to send any questions/hate mail/nudey snaps of your missus to [email protected]
I’ll be back next month with some more ludicrous guitar mayhem! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do…
