Buckethead plays a KFC bucket on his head, wears an expressionless white mask, and can shred faster than most of us can find our capo. His instrumental "Jordan" is the song a whole generation rage-quit in Guitar Hero II, and buried inside it is a nasty little tritone phrase that looks impossible until you stop trying to alternate pick it into submission.
This clip is Lick #45: a tritone-based hybrid picking line straight out of "Jordan." Could it be played cleaner? Absolutely — I'm the first to admit it. But it's a perfect excuse to teach your pick and your fingers to finally cooperate on a tritone, the interval your ears file under "something is very wrong here."
How this tritone hybrid picking lick works
A tritone is three whole tones — the augmented fourth, the "devil's interval," the sound of a fire truck and a horror movie having an argument. On the fretboard the two notes sit far enough apart that pure alternate picking becomes a coin flip. Enter hybrid picking: you strike the lower note with the pick and pluck the upper one with your middle finger, so both strings speak cleanly no matter how wide the leap. Buckethead builds chunks of "Jordan" out of exactly this kind of symmetrical shape, and the moment your pick and fingers stop bickering, the whole line snaps into focus.
The useful takeaway: treat pick and finger as one pincer that closes together — down-strike, up-pluck, as a single motion — and then slide that tritone grip up the neck. Because a tritone splits the octave dead in half, the shape is symmetrical: learn one grip and you basically get every three frets for free, which is a suspiciously good deal for something that sounds this evil.
Yes, it could be played cleaner — I said it before you could. If you want the PDF and the Guitar Pro file to slow it down and hunt every buzzing note with me, they're waiting on my Patreon, no bucket required.