Everybody remembers Slash for the top hat, the cigarette, and roughly nine thousand notes of Sweet Child O' Mine. Almost nobody expects the man to casually pull out a full-blown neoclassical, harmonic-minor lead line that sounds like Bach borrowed a Les Paul and forgot to give it back. Yet here we are, and here is "Anastasia."
This little clip is about half a minute of exactly that line — a slice of the dramatic, faintly Spanish, faintly evil lead work that made Anastasia the fanciest thing in Slash's catalogue. No band, no pyro, just the phrasing and the one scale trick that makes the whole thing drip with drama.
How this Anastasia line works
The secret sauce is harmonic minor. Anastasia lives in E minor, but Slash doesn't play the polite natural-minor scale — he raises the seventh degree from D to D#. That single sharpened note creates a leading tone that pulls hard toward the root, and it opens up a spicy augmented-second gap between the b6 (C) and that raised 7 (D#). That interval is the whole neoclassical, vaguely-Middle-Eastern flavour in one jump. Play E natural minor over the same chords and it sounds like a nice folk song. Sharpen the seventh and suddenly you're scoring a duel.
The concrete takeaway: take any minor scale you already own, raise the 7th, and land that raised note on strong beats right before the root. Slash phrases these lines like a singer — long notes, deliberate bends, breathing room between phrases — so it's melody first, shred second. If you know a little about arpeggios, you'll notice he outlines the underlying chords with the line instead of just running the scale up and down, which is why it sounds composed rather than noodled.
Nail this and you can bluff your way through "went to conservatory" at parties, all while owning zero powdered wigs. Full tab and the Guitar Pro file are waiting on my Patreon, top hat strictly optional.