There’s loads of great covers of ‘Parasite’ out there but even those who DO nail the bass notes and picking pattern (many don’t, no offense to them) and create great covers, struggle with one thing: getting all those seemingly random pull offs on the high e string in the same order as they are on the album. 

In fact, I’m not sure I’ve seen any cover, no matter how wonderfully played and sung, get it quite right (i’m willing to be corrected on this!, and I’ve seen people who give great tutorials even say things like “don’t worry about the pull offs, just do what you feel like”).

So this is a ‘cheat sheet’ for those of you who feel you’ve nailed the main picking pattern of the verse and chorus, but struggle to remember the order of the all those seemingly random pull offs that Nick does (as an aside, I believe he only did 2 takes for this track when recording - there’s a bootleg of the other one and it’s different in terms of the pull offs so perhaps to some extent Nick did slightly ‘make them up’ based on feel, who knows?)

This is meant as no criticism to the players of all the fantastic covers out there and I realise that they were not necessarily attempting to get all of the pull offs in the right order. I also know there’s a very long tab out there which may or may not get it spot on, but tbh that would be complicated to read through whilst playing. 

Please feel free to correct me on any mistakes, I think they’re in the correct order but i’ve written this quite early in the morning ;) I hope it helps someone x

p.s - is this the kind of thing worth submitting elsewhere? anyone know?



I made a little guitar 'cheat sheet' for the various pull offs at the end of each line in 'Parasite'