Fret Feed

Today we tackle one of the more difficult songs from Guitar Hero II, and one of my personal favorites, The Beast and the Harlot by Avenged Sevenfold.  This song is actually more complex than you might think upon first listen, as they use a lot of interesting compositional tools, especially when it comes to writing multi-guitar parts. let’s take a look at how this song is put together…

Tuning & Tone

This song is Drop D tuning (D A D G B E). For the rhythm tone, put a lot of distortion and bass on it, but not so much bass that it sounds muffled.  For the lead tone, you want a sharper, more biting sound. make sure you are using the bridge pickup, and depending on the amp, I would set the bass/mid/treble to about 4/6/8, respectively. Use a fair amount of gain and a little bit of reverb. Also, if you and another guitarist are harmonizing the parts, it’s important to use slightly different settings, or else the sounds just end up canceling each other out. If one of you is using the bridge pickup, the other should try the neck; you could also try slightly adjust the amp settings.

Intro

The Intro is in 9/8 time, with a bar of 6/8 thrown in, and covers a few different scales. It would be best to listen to it a couple times to get a feel for it. Also notice the use of vibratos and bends here, that gives the first intro riff a real impactful sound.

From there, the song really gets going, and and centers itself back in regular 4/4 time, strictly in the D minor key with a b5th (sometimes called the blue note) added in. Now one guitar plays a variation of the main verse riff 2 octaves higher, starting on the 12th fret of the D string.

Verse

The verse is some standard hard-rock/hevay metal riffage, with some palm-muted open low D strings and some power chords thrown in. Notice how the timing of the power chords changes between bars 1-2 of the chorus and bars 3-4. also notice how on the repeat the chords are slightly different between 3-4 and 7-8.

The verse then goes into a short pre-chorus riff twice using chromatic power chords to build tension to the upcoming chorus, from G to C.

Chorus

The chorus shows one of Avenged Sevenfold’s trademarks: high-pictched, solo-like riffs over standard power chord riffs. While the rhythm is pretty simple, the lead is playing 4 note ascending arpeggios on the higher frets, outlining a  F - C - Bb  - Gm - F - C - Bb progression, followed by descending riff based on Bb5 & A5 arpeggios, agrain to create cromatic tension.

Solo

The solo provides a clinic in both scale runs and harmonization. It’s interesting to note that instead of harmonizing in 3rds, They chose to harmonize in 5ths on this song, which gives it a unique sound. If you having trouble with the solo, just take it slow at first, make sure you can play it cleanly, and slowly build up speed. There are a lot of tricky sections here.

you can watch the music video here:

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