Riff Playbooks: Dave Davidson of Revocation

Dave Davidson
 posted

Introduction

The "Riff Playbooks" column is designed to make you a better player. By gleaning some insight into the technique, composition, and execution of these fine riffs by fine SH artists, you are bound to make headway in your own playing. We cordially invite you to steal a page from our books in order to expand your own diabolical playbook of musical wizardry (not literally though, the books are expensive to create).

 


Death metal. Thrash metal. Jazz Fusion. There's only one band who are going to serve you up a seamless blend of these three genres, and that band is Revocation. Between Dave Davidson's wildly proficient extreme metal guitar technique, and his jazz-laden education at Berklee College of Music, no one is as qualified as he is to take the contexts of death and thrash metal, and infuse them with the expansive melodic capabilities of jazz.

If you haven't heard revocation, firstly, get off your ass. And secondly, once you've heard it you will quickly understand that there is nothing typical about this music, and that there is an absolutely immense amount that can be taught to us by its writers. Dave decided to show us a section from the song "Scorched Earth Policy", which boasts quite a few (appropriately) blistering death/thrash riffs, and a solo that explores every melodic nook and cranny of its fusion inspired chord progression. In the "Deathless" guitar transcription book, we are looking at pages 2-3, bars 25-37.



After ripping through this section a few times, Dave was kind enough to field some of our questions about him and his music:



 


To check out The Complete Guitar Transcription for Revocation's "Deathless" click HERE.  


What's that? You want to learn the entire song "Scorched Earth Policy" - you got it!  click HERE


If you'd like to listen to the song in its entirety, head to one of the links below:


Sheet Happens Staff are currently hard at work producing The Complete Guitar Transcriptions for "Great is Our Sin" and "The Outer Ones"!  Stay tuned for those releases in the coming months!

Related Columns

View all