The bend toward the end of the lick can be tricky to perform. When pulling off, be sure to pull the string in toward the palm as you release it. You’ll want a good, strong attack on the picked notes, as this will give you plenty of momentum to make the pull-offs and hammer-ons as loud and clear as possible. Each lick incorporates techniques and stylistic elements that are characteristic of either a specific artist or a subgenre of the greater country guitar style.įIGURE 1, based on the A Mixolydian mode (A B C# D E F# G), with the minor third, C, added for a bluesy twist, is played in second position and utilizes lots of double and single pull-offs to open strings, which create an instant country-twang vibe. In this lesson, Guitar World presents 20 country licks designed to teach you how to play authentic country guitar. As is the case with any style, the best way to get a grasp of country guitar is to listen to its most celebrated pickers past and present and learn some of their signature licks and playing approaches.Ĭheck out old-school country guitarists such as Atkins, Merle Travis, Hank Garland and Jerry Reed, acoustic bluegrass flatpickers like Clarence White, Doc Watson and Tony Rice, and modern electric country players such as Albert Lee, Brent Mason, Brad Paisley, Johnny Hiland, Keith Urban, Jerry Donanue and Vince Gill, to name a few. (By comparison, the rock-oriented approach to soloing involves finding a scale or mode that “agrees with” a chord and playing licks and patterns based on that scale.)Ĭountry guitarists will often strive to emulate the signature licks of fiddle, banjo or pedal-steel players, cleverly borrowing a variety of techniques and musical approaches from these instruments and adapting them to the guitar. Interestingly, country guitarists tend to approach soloing in a way similar to jazz musicians, often crafting licks that either melodically describe the underlying chord changes via arpeggio-based ideas or emphasize chord tones. Most players eschew the use of high-tech, high-gain amps or psychedelic effects and opt instead for a more “honest”-sounding bright-clean and/or “organically” overdriven tone with some spring reverb and compression. Learn one chord at a time if you have to, but don’t get demotivated just because it sounds difficult.Classic American-style tube amps, such as vintage Fenders, are the rig of choice for many country guitarists. I don’t consider this lesson to be the “Blues for Absolute Beginner” type of thing but more of a simple, intermediate twelve-bar fingerstyle blues. Instead, we will focus on how to play the blues on acoustic guitar using the fingerpicking technique. Nobody wants to strum a couple of dominant 7th chords all day long. I really did my best to make this blues as simple as possible.Īlso, I think that with the information you learned so far, playing the blues could be kind of boring. So far, I know that we only covered a few basics, but I trusted me. In this lesson, I will show you how to combine chords and melody over twelve-bar blues. Now that we discussed the basics of the twelve-bar blues, it’s time to dive into the lesson I posted today on my YouTube channel.
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