According to guitar teaching legend Troy Grady, if you were learning guitar during the 1980s, you were in one of two camps - either a fan of Eddie Van Halen or Randy Rhoads.
Now, being as my first abortive attempt at learning the guitar was in 1989 aged 12, I can neither confirm nor deny this theory - but it does make a good line ;-)
Eddie has already been covered in this blog, and I also covered legendary Ozzy sideman and solo artist Zakk Wylde back at the end of 2023, so for the final month of 2024 (Christ that feels weird to write!) I decided to go right back to the start of Ozzy's career and tackle the very first player to occupy one of the most legendary guitar spots in the whole of rock and metal - Randy Rhoads.
Born December 6th 1956 in Santa Monica, California as the youngest of three children to music teacher parents, young Randy began playing the guitar aged just six. His father had left and remarried when Randy was just 17 months old, and faced with the need to support her family, his mother Dolores opened her own music school in North Hollywood, drawing on her experience as a professional pianist and bachelor's degree in music.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Randy was a shy and introverted child, practicing guitar religiously and quickly became highly proficient - lacking a stereo, the three children would create their own music in the house.
Moving into his teenage years, Randy became entranced by artists like Alice Cooper, the Scorpions and Leslie West from Mountain and began teaching himself the licks he heard, particularly on the bootleg recordings that were popular with the time. After a couple of early bands Randy and high school friend Kelly Garni formed Quiet Riot - at this point, Randy had graduated high school and was teaching at his mother's music school, and it was during this period that Ozzy Osbourne had quit Black Sabbath and had come to Los Angeles to form a new band.
There is some.. confusion.. in Ozzy's accounts of the audition process, but what is undeniable fact is that Randy was hired and joined the band for Blizzard of Ozz in 1979. Tragically, his life would be cut short three years later aged just 25 in a hideous - and it would seem, completely avoidable - plane accident, and the guitar world lost an incredible talent.
I set myself the rough goal of transcribing the whole of the Blizzard Of Ozz album and, thanks in part to having already done Crazy Train a few years back, managed it! So this is where we'll be drawing this month's licks from. So buckle up and brace yourselves, there's a lot to get through!
OK, let's begin with "Crazy Train" - this lick is the fill Randy plays at the end of the first chorus, primarily based around F# minor pentatonic but incorporating elements of the blues scale and the natural minor.
On the face of it, this could be a Jimmy Page / Angus Young pentatonic widdle blitz (not that there's anything wrong wiith that), but when you look closer you notice Randy leaning heavily on the b6 (D) and making repeated use of the b5 (C) at the end of the lick. This is a great way of spicing up licks and runs you already know - try this in different keys, and try making it fit the Dorian (R 2 b3 4 5 6 b7) and Phrygian modes (R b2 b3 4 5 b6 b7) too (I'll show what I mean in the demo video). Most likely, Randy would have developed this by replicating pentatonic lines and "tweaking" them to contain notes from more exotic scales - this is a great technique to try out.
Moving away from scalar passages for a moment, this second example taken from "Mr Crowley" shows Randy using an arpeggio idea (similar to Hotel California or Hendrix's "Axis") to outline the Dm - Bb - F - C chord sequence:
He then follows this up with a couple of trills involving the b2 (Eb) and a tremolo picked passage based around an E diminished 7th (R b3 b5 bb7 - E G Bb Db) arpeggio with the b2 and b7 added for extra dissonance, before finishing off with a band from the E to the F and back again as the chord moves to C, thus targeting the 3rd to resolve the line.
Trills seem to have been an important part of Randy's signature neoclassical approach, and this next example taken from "Revelation (Mother Earth)" illustrates this:
This track revolves around an Em - B chord progression that we can view as based in E harmonic minor (R 2 b3 4 5 b6 7 - E F# G A B C D#) and trilling his way up that scale across two octaves before finishing with a Bach-style pedal tone idea, playing the A, G and F# notes against the high B on the 19th fret.
Now, I've saved the best til last with the final example. Taken from "Steal Away The Night", this is based around an E diminished 7th arpeggio - R b3 b5 bb7, E G Bb Db.
Randy starts by sequencing his way across the arpeggio in groups of 3 with a triplet rhythm - again, taking traditional classic rock rhythmic phrasing, but with a twist in the note selection - before going into a "Magic 3 Notes" style hammer/pull idea which he then moves up the neck symmetrically in intervals of a minor third (3 frets). This fits together beautifully because the whole premise of a diminished 7th chord is that it's stacked minor 3rds (thus you could see the arpeggio as G, Bb or Db diminished 7th, but I chose E because METAL).
There's a thread I see with Randy's playing on this album of him trying to forge his own identity by taking some of the pentatonic/blues vocabulary of the 60s & 70s and being more adventurous with his note choices, trying to blend blues-rock rhythmic phrasing with classical note choices, and I think I'm going to have to coime back and transcribe the follow up "Diary Of A Madman" to see how this developed.. but seeing this somehow makes his untimely death all the more tragic as it's clear he was just finding his feet as a musician at this point, and what he could have gone on to accomplish can only be guessed at.
Join me next month for a (relatively) unsung guitar genius who is thankfully still with us (and long may that continue!) as we investigate one of my personal Guitar Crushes - Neil Zaza!
