Johann Sebastian Bach has been dead since 1750, and he can still make your picking hand file for early retirement. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor is the sound of every haunted house, every silent-movie villain, and every dramatic organ entrance ever committed to tape — and Bach wrote it before electricity, distortion, or the concept of "shredding" existed. Rude, honestly.
This 28-second clip is my attempt to drag that Baroque monster onto a six-string. It takes the famous descending theme and reworks it into a neoclassical lick built on alternate picking and string skipping — the exact kind of thing Yngwie Malmsteen has been doing to Bach for decades, except I only had 28 seconds and considerably less hairspray.
How this Toccata and Fugue lick works
The whole thing lives in D minor, and the moment you add that raised seventh (the C#) you're in harmonic minor territory — which is exactly why it sounds so gloriously villainous. The technical trick is that the notes don't sit politely next to each other: they leap over a string, so instead of raking through everything you have to skip. That forces you into strict alternate picking (down-up-down-up, no cheating) while your idle strings stay dead silent.
Here's the useful takeaway: practise this at half the speed you think you need, and let your palm and your fretting-hand fingers mute the string you're jumping over. Ninety percent of "my string skipping sounds messy" is not a speed problem — it's an open string ringing out and snitching on you. Clean first, fast later.
Play it slowly enough and you'll sound like a Baroque genius; play it too fast and you'll sound like a Baroque genius falling down the stairs. Ask me how I know. Want the tab and the Guitar Pro file so you can slow it down yourself? Grab it over on my Patreon.