Bark At The Moon Guitar Tab

Getting "Bark At The Moon" Right on Guitar

The main riff lives in B minor and sits around the 7th fret position. Standard tuning. E A D G B E. The opening pattern is basically a two-note figure played with relentless alternate picking, moving across adjacent strings. You'll see it written as a series of hammer-ons and pull-offs over a held low B, then shifting up to the G and D strings. The tempo is roughly 112 BPM, which feels manageable until you try to play it cleanly through an entire verse. Here's the opening riff in standard notation form, starting on the low E string: That's the core hook. Play it with strict alternate picking. Down-up-down-up. Don't let the notes bleed into each other. The transition from the 9th fret back down to the 7th, then the 5th, is where most people lose momentum. Keep your picking hand relaxed. Tight fingers here will sound like you're choking the string.

The chord voicings underneath use Bm power chords (x2443x) and G major shapes moved up the neck. The verse progression cycles through Bm - G - D - A, which is already pretty standard for this kind of hard rock material. The trick isn't the chord changes themselves, it's making them sound heavy without the rhythm going muddy. A little high-end EQ on your amp helps. You want the attack of the pick to come through, not a blob of distortion. I ran into a real problem when I was trying to learn the clean fingerstyle intro section. Most online tabs show it as one continuous run, but the actual recording has a subtle ghost note between the 5th and 7th fret on the A string that most transcribers skip entirely. If you ignore it, the lick sounds hollow. What I ended up doing was slowing the track down to 60% speed in a program like Audacity, isolating the guitar frequency range with a bandpass filter around 800 Hz to 2.5 kHz, and watching the waveform to see where the notes actually started and stopped. That ghost note is a quick pull-off from the 7th fret back to the 5th fret on the A string, played between the second and third strum of the bar. Once I had that figured out, everything else fell into place. It took about three hours of ear-training to nail that one spot, which is honestly typical for transcribing Randy Rhoads' parts since he rarely played anything exactly twice the same way. The solo section is where people tend to struggle. It's largely built around B harmonic minor and E minor pentatonic runs, with a lot of three-notes-per-string patterns and occasional string skipping. The fast descending run around the 12th to 15th fret area uses a combination of alternate picking and light legato. Practice it at 60% speed first. If you can't play it clean at a slow tempo, you definitely won't play it clean at full speed. This is non-negotiable. I've seen too many players try to rush the tempo and develop bad habits that take months to undo.

One counter-intuitive thing about this song: the vibrato technique matters more than the picking precision. Randy used a wide, classical-style vibrato on the sustained notes, not the tight punk-rock shake you hear in a lot of modern playing. If you're using a whammy bar, keep it minimal. The original recording barely uses it except for the occasional dip on the final sustained chord. Don't go full dive-bomb on every note. It sounds amateurish and takes away from the melodic content. As for learning resources, most of the tabs you'll find on Guitar Trick, Songsterr, or Ultimate-Guitar are reasonably accurate for the main riff and verse, but the solo sections vary wildly in quality. Some are transcribed by ear and are decent, while others are clearly AI-generated or copied from bad sources with wrong fret numbers. I'd recommend pairing any tab with the actual track and cross-referencing. It takes longer but it's the only way to be sure you're playing the right notes. The official "Blizzard of Ozz" album liner notes have some rudimentary chord charts that are surprisingly useful, though they're not full tabs. One thing worth noting: this song works best with a mid-range focused amp setting. Too much bass and the riff loses its definition. Too much treble and it becomes brittle. I've found that a moderate gain setting with the mids pushed up around 4-5 o'clock gives you the best clarity for this particular riff. A Tube Screamer or similar boost pedal in front of the amp helps tighten things up if your amp sounds flubby at the lower registers.

If you're looking for a downloadable tab, Songsterr has a solid version that lets you adjust the tempo and loop specific sections, which is genuinely helpful for learning the faster passages. The free version has ads but the tab accuracy is better than most free alternatives. I've tried the paid versions on a few other sites and honestly didn't notice enough improvement to justify the cost for this particular song. The hardest part to master is maintaining consistent rhythm through the entire song. The tempo doesn't change, but there are sections where the feel shifts slightly between straight picking and more legato phrases. Don't rush through these transitions. Play each section at its own pace, then gradually increase the tempo only after you can play it cleanly at the slower speed. This approach usually cuts practice time significantly compared to just cranking through the song at full speed repeatedly.