How to Play Five FEROCIOUS Zakk Wylde Guitar Licks | Guitar Lesson

A celebration of the 20th anniversary of Zakk Wylde’s Black Label Society via five E minor licks in his signature, rapid-fire style.
This salute includes Tab, playing notes, and tips, plus a quick overview of Zakk’s blissfully brewtal journey thus far. It also explores “what makes Zakk pick” via excerpts from an interview the author did with Mr. Wylde in 1989 — a staggering 30 years ago!
Zakk’s Early Years & Ozzmosis
When that British metal icon and much loved, self-professed madman Ozzy Osbourne first found a fledgling Zakk Wylde in 1987, the guitarist was only 20 years young. A diehard Black Sabbath and Randy Rhoads fan, Zakk was getting by pumping gas, teaching guitar, and gigging with Zyris — a typical big-riffs, bigger-hair metal act that was amassing a strong following in the guitarist’s home state of New Jersey, USA. Even back then, he had his trademark muscular vibrato and furiously fast, alternate picking pentatonic fury mastered.

Zakk offers his axe up to Odin, while a bemused Ozzfest security chap looks on.

When Ozzy announced on Howard Stern’s popular American radio show that he was looking for a new guitarist, many of Zakk’s friends and fans immediately suggested he should send a tape in. Zakk did exactly that via a guy who was friends with well-known American rock photographer Mark Weiss, who was the conduit for getting Zakk’s demo in Osbourne’s hands and on his radar. And sure enough, as a result Zakk got the “you’ve got an audition” phone call and also a plane ticket to LA.

Zakk was one of several hundred hopefuls invited. “I ended up going to two auditions in LA,” Zakk told me a couple of years later. “I didn’t meet or even see Ozzy on the first one — it was just me and the band jamming around.” Zakk returned home to the East Coast but was asked to return to LA a mere couple of days later. “That’s when I met Ozzy for the first time, and the first thing I did was ask him for his autograph,” the guitarist recalled with a grin.
Zakk not only got Osbourne’s signature — he also got the gig. Before he knew it, he was in England working on the writing and recording of his first album with Ozzy: 1988’s platinum opus, No Rest for the Wicked — the vocalist’s fifth studio release since his departure from Black Sabbath.
Zakk’s larger-than-life tone and his no-nonsense playing style — no tapping, whammy bar, sweep picking, or harmonic minor scale — made him a unique stand out from the rest of the metal-shredding pack. It also quickly had the press, public, and many of his peers hailing him as the next “Rock Guitar Hero,” and they were right.

Zakk celebrates yet another Best Rock Guitarist magazine Readers’ Poll win backstage somewhere in the mid-2000s.

What Makes Zakk Pick?
I first met Zakk in 1989 when I interviewed him for the November cover story of UK’s Guitarist magazine. In it, the then (very!) clean-cut axman revealed that his no-nonsense, pentatonic approach was a 110% deliberate decision.

A very clean-cut Zakk in 1989.

Zakk in 2018 — not so clean but definitely “cut”!

“I got totally caught up in that ‘I wanna blow everyone else away,’ ego trip,” he recalled with a wry grin. “At that point in my life, playing rock or blues licks was one huge joke. Lead work was all about scales, and the faster you could wail them out the better! I literally spent thousands of hours playing scales up and down the neck thinking I was the coolest dude around. Looking back, it was pathetic.”
So what happened to change our subject’s mind-set and playing approach? A major turning point pivots around one of the finest rock guitarists you’ve probably never heard of. “My band opened for TT Quick, and their guitarist, Dave DiPietro, blew me away because his leads were so cool,” Zakk spouted enthusiastically. “He was using rock and blues stuff — the things I considered cheesy back then — and it sounded great, like music. You could actually feel his playing, and it was mostly based on pentatonic scales. That’s when I saw the light and realized where I’d been going wrong. I knew how to smoke out exotic scales, but I couldn’t play the blues to save my life. I couldn’t bend properly either. Boy did I feel dumb.”
So what did Zakk do? He was smart enough to ask Mr. DiPietro for some lessons! “Dave was great for me,” the Wylde one admitted. “He taught me how to slow down and think about what I was doing in the context of the song. Through him, I learned to play the blues and also how to use string bends and vibrato properly.” And the rest, as the saying goes, is now rock history.

Sold-out Black Label Society (BLS) show in London, England, 2011. Got amps?!?!

No More Tears & No More Tours
After some extensive touring, Zakk’s second album with Ozzy, No More Tears, was unleashed in September 1991. Housing hits such as the title track, “Mama, I’m Coming Home” (cowritten by Ozzy and Zakk with the late, great Lemmy Kilmister), and the Grammy-winning “I Don’t Want to Change the World,” No More Tears sold over four million copies in America alone. It also legitimized Zakk’s Guitar Hero status, forever writing it in stone — and deservedly so.
Ozzy announced his retirement after the release of No More Tears and embarked on a farewell concert run in 1992, entitled No More Tours. Thankfully Ozzy’s alleged retirement was one of the shortest in history!
Going Solo: Black Label Society & More
While with Ozzy, Zakk had a fun side project, a cover band called Lynyrd Skinhead, so named for his love of both Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, as well as Black Sabbath. When Ozzy cut him loose, Zakk formed Pride & Glory — an original band with a similar Southern spin. After touring to support that outfit’s eponymous 1994 debut, Zakk returned to the quickly unretired Ozzy Osbourne to make 1995’s Ozzmosis — and then Zakk and Ozzy parted ways. Rumours about Zakk becoming a member of Guns N’ Roses abounded, but that never came to pass, and Zakk released an acoustic album called Book of Shadows in 1998. During that self-same year, 1998, Zakk formed Black Label Society (BLS), and a brewtal debut, entitled Sonic Brew, was unleashed in 1999. Despite returning to tour with Ozzy in 2001 and also working on the singer’s 2007 Black Rain album and tour, BLS continued to record and tour extensively all over the world. As a result, the band’s eighth studio album, Order of the Black, deservedly reached #4 on the Billboard 200 chart.
Being the workaholic he is, Zakk also formed Zakk Sabbath in 2014 — a power trio that purely plays, wait for it, Black Sabbath classics! Said outfit has not only toured with great success but has also hit the stages of several major festivals.
In 2018, BLS released their 10th studio effort, Grimmest Hits, and hit the road once more. While the band’s schedule has been interrupted by Zakk’s involvement with Ozzy’s final tour (for real this time, apparently) — No More Tours 2* — BLS are hitting the road as much as possible this year to celebrate 20 years of BLS.
*NOTE: Sadly, due to health, Ozzy has had to cancel or postpone many dates — we, like the rest of the rock-loving masses, wish the Prince of Darkness a full and speedy recovery.

Zakk with his good friend the late, great Jim Marshall — the founder of the famous British guitar amp company that proudly bears his name.

Story time over — let’s get to those five celebratory Zakk-style licks. All are in the key of E minor, so we’ll start by looking at the four scales we’ll be (ab)using:

As mentioned on the accompanying video, these five licks are not merely my “best guess,” but they’re plundered direct from the man himself thanks to the extensive work I’ve fortunately done with him for Guitar World. This includes several “Private Lesson” features, his acclaimed 8-page “Guitar Boot Camp” cover story in July 2004, and also his popular monthly column in the 2000s titled “Brewtality.”

Zakk during the making of his Guitar World “Boot Camp” — the article has been reprinted several times due to its popularity.

Using the bridge pickup for maximum cut, Lick 1 starts with two familiar “Zakkisms.” The first is a dramatic burst of natural harmonics induced by aggressively trilling on the A string with your fretboard hand while lightly resting the underside of your thumb against that string and moving it along the string as shown in the video. The second is a unison bend, a 4-note ascent of the G and B strings, with the notes on the G string being bent up to the pitch of the notes fretted on the B — hence the name: unison bend. It then finishes with a short, sweet E minor blues scale (E, G, A, Bb, B, D) motif in the 12th position.

First and foremost, let’s switch to the smoother, warmer sound of the neck pickup for this bad boy, which is inspired by the dramatic yet melodic first three bars of Zakk’s acclaimed “Miracle Man” solo. When played in E minor, this almost classical-sounding, natural minor scale (E, F#, G, A, B, C, D) climb of the G and B strings outlines the following trio of chords as indicated above the Tab — Asus2 (A, B, E), Bm (B, D, F#), and C (C, E, G). Each and every note in the first three bars is picked, and since each arpeggio is a repeated triad (3 notes) played as 16th notes, the run has a cool, syncopated feel and sound.
In bar 4, we play a rapid burst of 16th-note E minor pentatonic sextuplets (6 notes played in the time of 4) on the E and B strings. I “cheat” and use a pull-off for the second note of each one, but Zakk would definitely pick ’em all — with his signature aggressive precision. Incidentally, the second sextuplet outlines Em7 (E, G, B, D), keeping the lick’s classical bent intact.

This 16th-note descent and ascent is a nice “calm” after the brief “storm” of sextuplets that concluded Lick 2. A lot of rock guitarists would save such a speedy salvo for the climactic end of a solo, but Zakk is a master of the deft art of “light and shade.” This lick is essentially an E minor blues scale ditty, but its ascent adds the major 7th note (D#) as a passing tone on the D string to add a neat chromatic vibe.

This is an alternate picking (down, up, down, up, etc.), 16th-note E minor blues motif that is basically a quartet of 4-note patterns, three of which are played more than once, before finishing with a neat passing note descent. It also includes a couple of Zakk’s trademark pinch harmonics. Why? Because those sonic squeals are mandatory in Wylde World!
To make this easier to both learn and execute, I look at it as two separate 2-bar phrases that are joined to be one. And the same is true for the next lick.

IMHO, just like Lick 2 and Lick 3, this one sounds best when played using the neck pickup. This is another 16th-note, alternate picking blaze of E minor blues. It is also deceptively difficult, as the intervals it employs will definitely mess with your muscle memory and could well tangle your fretboard fingers into a painful pretzel! I used two ploys to help me master this tricky one to the best of my ability, and they are:

Break it down into a pair of 2-bar sections — just like we did with Lick 4. You’ll be pleased to know that the first 28 notes of each of the two sections are identical — it’s just the last few notes where there’s a deviation. So once you’ve mastered the first two bars, you’ve got the majority of the lick already down! Incidentally, it would be remiss of me not to point out that this last handful of notes sees the introduction of C#, the raised 6th, and so the E minor Dorian mode (E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D).
Due to the aforementioned weird (to me) intervals this lick uses, as shown on the video, I literally broke it down into a bunch of bite-sized chunks of four notes at a time. I’d learn the first four notes, then the second four — and wouldn’t move on to the next four until I could play the first eight consistently and at speed. Make sense?

And that, my friend, concludes our celebration of Black Label Society hitting the prestigious 20-year mark. I sincerely hope you enjoyed the five licks we’ve just learned. Zakk would, of course, play them way faster and much more precisely than I ever could. That said, doing this was more of a blast than a challenge. So, to close, all that’s left to say is:
Zakk — Happy 20th BLS anniversary, my SDMF brother!!

The author with Zakk and the actual brown leather waistcoat that the late, great Randy Rhoads often wore onstage with Ozzy.

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