The Number of the Beast Guitar Lesson – Iron Maiden
In these The Number of the Beast guitar lesson videos, I will show you how to play this Iron Maiden classic in it's entirety.
In the first video lesson, I will demonstrate all of the rhythm guitar riffs and in the second video lesson I will demonstrate how to play Dave Murray and Adrian Smith's guitar solos note-for-note.
We begin with that instantly recognizable guitar riff that opens the song. This riff is by far the most challenging riff of the entire song. It is difficult not only because of it's rapid downstrokes, but because of the timing as well.
I will break the timing down so it is easy to understand and follow along with. After that, it will just be about trying to keep the picking hand as relaxed as possible in order to get it up to tempo.
For some of the riffs I will also show you both guitar parts that are played together on the original recording. If you don't have a second guitarist in your band to help you out with this, simply choose the riff that sounds best to you and play that one. Both guitarists are essentially playing the same chords, just different voicing of them, so it will still sound great.
In the second video lesson we finally make it to the guitar solos. Davie Murray's solo is the first one up and it is full of long legato licks. Once you get the feel of moving the trills down the string the solo becomes pretty easy to play.
Adrian Smith's solo has a few more techniques to get a handle of. A lot of this solo contains a bunch of very fast blues based licks that require a lot of bends or fast picking with pull-offs.
Learning the solos phrase-by-phrase is the best way to get the notes under your fingers without getting overwhelmed with the amount of notes there are to learn.
Have fun with this Iron Maiden classic!
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