Hello, and welcome to my first installment of many lessons I will have available on my site.

Today we are going to talk about the harmonic minor and go over a vicious picking exercise using the harmonic minor in the key of F#.

Ok, the harmonic minor is a natural minor scale with one alteration, it has a raised 7th. For those of you that do not know what that means, do this, play f# minor, count the notes as you go along, When you get to note # 7, instead of playing that note, sharp that note a half step and play that one instead. And "voila", there you have the F# harmonic minor!

So, the riff I have for you today is a fairly long descending run starting on the 17th fret. It is straight 16th notes played in 4/4 time, its going to feel a little strange at first, because the run doesn't have a 4/4 feel. That is why this is an awesome sounding run, kind of playing around with the meter. Remember to use a metronome, (VERY IMPORTANT), and play it slowly at first and concentrate on solid timing.