Alex Skolnick turns a Testament lick into a six-string legato lesson
His first Guitar World column in three decades breaks an E Lydian-dominant line into practical hammer-on and pull-off studies.
Oct 12, 2026
Credit: Future (via source)
Alex Skolnick has returned to Guitar World as a columnist with a lesson built around the legato phrasing he used in Testament’s 1992 track “So Many Lies.” The exercise crosses all six strings in E Lydian-dominant and minimizes picking, relying on hammer-ons, pull-offs and notes sounded “from nowhere.”
The article includes notation and a lesson video, then divides the run into smaller top-three-string and lower-three-string fragments before transposing the idea to B Lydian-dominant. Skolnick also explains Allan Holdsworth’s influence on the smooth, connected articulation behind the phrase.
Credit: Guitar World
Why it matters
This is a substantial, playable lesson from a major metal and jazz-fusion guitarist, with both notation and a directly embedded demonstration rather than a short tip.
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