In this post, we’ll go through a Your Betrayal guitar lesson and guitar cover by Bullet For My Valentine. This song is a great starting point for someone who is an intermediate player, and wants to push into heavier music. The guitar riffs are fast, and sometimes a bit complicated, but they are straight-forward enough to grasp mentally so that you can focus on the technique, tone, rhythm, and ultimately a guitar cover performance.
A few tips:
- Listen carefully to your articulation, tone, and rests. This song is TIGHT rhythmically. This means that your articulations (picking, palm muting, hammer ons and pull offs, slides, etc) – the manner in which you play the notes – needs to be very precise and clean, yet at the same time aggressive and intentional. The pal muted notes and accented chords should have a stark contrast between them without any blurred lines. Listen to the tone of your guitar, especially during palm muting, and really dial in your sound. Rests should be tight, rhythmic cut-offs that leave the listener hanging.
- Pull-offs in the main lead – part C – should be pulled DOWN towards the fretboard and adjacent string for a quality open-string tone. Sometimes, the pull-offs in section C are not executed in the right angle, and the guitarist loses the effect of the pull off. Basically, you hear the fretted notes but not the pull offs. Be sure your tip joints are CURVED and “bite” at the string. If your tip joints are flat, you will lose leverage and the pull off will be weak and the open string will be essentially unheard.
- Diligently practice section I (as in, “Irene”), as it is a great example of varying articulations and rests to create interest and contrast on a single power chord.
Check out the Your Betrayal GUITAR COVER here!
Nate Richards is the owner of Richards Guitar Studio and Richards Rock Academy in Aston, PA.