Tornado Of Souls Tab

Learning the Megadeth Tornado of Souls Tab

Most people trying to learn this song first run into the alternate tuning. It's E A D G B E, which is standard tuned down a minor third. Dave Mustaine plays it that way, and if you try to read a standard E tuning tab against the recording, everything will sound wrong. The most reliable tabs out there will show you the tuning upfront, but honestly, some of the free ones on various guitar forums still just write it in standard notation and expect you to figure it out. That wastes about twenty minutes before you realize what's happening. The official Megadeth tablature book from Hal Leonard is the most accurate you'll find for this track. It lists every note correctly, including the intro riff and the solo phrasing. If you want something free, Songsterr has a decent community version with playback, and the tabs on GuitarTabs.com are usable but occasionally have the wrong fret numbers on the B string during the verse chords. I've personally spent time cross-referencing all three to iron out the discrepancies. The intro is where most people struggle. It's a picked arpeggio pattern across the low strings that requires precise palm muting. The tab usually shows this as something like 0-2-0-3 on the low E, then 0-2-0-3 on the A, then the same shape up the neck. The trick is not muting too aggressively. When I first learned it, I was choking the strings so hard the notes sounded dead and the timing dragged. The workaround was to rest my palm lightly against the bridge just enough to kill the ring but not enough to suffocate the attack. It took maybe three weeks of slow practice at 60 BPM to get it clean.

The Solo Section

The solo is in the key of E minor but it uses a lot of E harmonic minor licks, which means you're seeing a lot of D naturals and G sharps. A lot of beginner tabs miss the hybrid picking on the solo and just write it as alternate picking. If you follow those tabs, your fingers will fight you on the string crossing sections. Mustaine picks mostly with a pick but uses his middle and ring fingers for certain notes in the arpeggiated runs. The second run at around the 7-minute mark of the song is especially tough if you're only alternate picking. I found that learning the solo in sections and slowing it to 40 BPM with a metronome was the only way to actually internalize it. Speeding up too fast creates bad habits, especially with the legato bends in the final chorus. The bent notes need to be precise — they're often a quarter tone or a full step, and the tab notation doesn't always specify which. You'll have to listen closely to the recording to tell the difference.

Common Mistakes

One thing nobody really warns beginners about is the chord voicings in the verses. The open chord shapes you see in a lot of tabs aren't quite right. The actual voicing uses a D shape barre at the fifth fret with an added major seventh on the G string. Playing the wrong chord shape makes the harmony sound muddy and completely misses the Melvyn Gale layering from the album version. This is one of those cases where the tab is technically correct but sounds wrong when you play it because the fingerings don't match the recorded arrangement. Another issue is tempo. The song sits around 132 BPM and it's not easy to maintain that with the picking patterns Mustaine uses. If you practice too slowly for too long, your hand won't be able to handle the speed when you eventually crank it back up. I kept my metronome at 80 BPM maximum during the learning phase and only pushed it past 100 BPM once the muscle memory was solid.

Downloading and Using Tab Software

If you want to download tabs for this song, most people use Guitar Pro files because they let you slow the tempo without changing the pitch. The .gpx format is the most widely supported now. Free programs like TuxGuitar can open them just fine. I'd recommend finding a well-rated Guitar Pro tab rather than a text-based one because the rhythm notation is much clearer and the fingerpicking patterns are easier to read at a glance. There's a tradeoff with Guitar Pro files though. They're great for learning but some of the free downloads online have timing errors or wrong note placements, especially on the faster solo passages. I once spent a whole week trying to learn a solo section from a downloaded GPX file that had the wrong tablature for measures 4 through 8. It turned out the upload was based on someone's guess rather than the actual recording. Always double-check against the song if a passage sounds off. The tuning itself can also cause issues if your guitar isn't staying in tune. Playing E minor lowered a minor third puts extra tension on the strings, and cheaper guitars tend to go sharp after a few minutes of playing. I use a Strobostrobe tuner when setting up and recheck after every session. It's a small thing but it makes the difference between sounding good and sounding amateur hour.

What Works and What Doesn't

Practicing the intro riff separately from the chords is the most efficient approach. Most people try to learn the whole song linearly and end up frustrated because the intro and the verse have completely different techniques. Break it into three parts: the intro arpeggios, the verse chord progression, and the solo. Spend about two weeks on each before combining them. The whole song usually takes most people four to six weeks to get to a performance level if they're practicing an hour a day. Transposing this to standard tuning is possible but it changes the tonality entirely and the chords don't sound the same. Some players do it for convenience but the drop in harmonic richness is noticeable. If you're in a band setting where everyone else uses standard tuning, you'll either need to retune or find a compromise that works for the group. There's no good middle ground where it sounds exactly like the record in standard tuning.