HOW TO PLAY THIS MONTH’S SONGS

By Jimmy Brown

“MAMA, I’M COMING HOME”

Ozzy Osbourne

WITH SO MUCH well-deserved attention paid to Zakk Wylde’s flashy lead guitar playing, it’s all too easy to overlook the burly axman’s diverse musicality and songwriting and arranging talents.

This beautifully constructed power ballad, conceived during his fruitful collaborative tenure with Ozzy Osbourne on their classic 1991 album, No More Tears, showcases Zakk’s versatility and command of traditional acoustic guitar playing approaches and techniques, in addition to his trademark metal and hard rock electric guitar swagger.

Following an opening pedal steel-style oblique pre-bend and release, performed on acoustic, Wylde commences the song’s repeating two-bar verse riff (bars 1 and 2), for which he deftly employs flatpicking and ringing open strings to play a shimmering descending figure that walks down the E major scale (E, F# , G# , A, B, C# , D# ) on the 3rd string. Notice the picking indications below bar 1 and how the guitarist uses a recurring crosspicking pattern (one note per string), with each fretted note picked with a downstroke and followed by open E and B notes on the top two strings, both picked with upstrokes.