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3 Cool Blues Guitar Licks for Soloing (50CBLI)

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3 Cool Blues Guitar Licks for SoloingToday I’ll show you 3 cool blues licks from the 50CoolBluesLicksImprovisation Course. (See below this post for more info).

Blues licks are an essential part of learning to solo and improvise on your guitar. They are small parts/fragments of an entire solo. You can see them as the beautiful words that spice up your story line, bringing drama, elegance, juice, soul, and excitement to your soloing. You can incorporate licks into your solos, copy them, learn from them, rip them apart, and rebuild them to create your own.

Building a vocabulary of licks expands your musical ideas and insight, and gives you greater flexibility in your soloing and improvisation.

Know that blues licks are not just for blues music. They are used widely in rock, country, jazz, pop and many other styles of music. They are beneficial to your playing in every way.

So let’s get started.

Enjoy!

blues lick 34

blues lick 11

blues lick 41

If you want to learn more cool blues licks, how to create your own, connect licks together, learn to solo and improvise all over the neck, and dive into the scale shapes, tricks and tools to really master the Pentatonic / Blues Scale inside out, check out:

The 50CoolBluesLicksImprovisation Course

Get Your Soloing and Improvisation Skills to the Next Step!

6 Vital Reasons Why and How You Should Learn Guitar Licks

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6 vital reasons why and how you should learn guitar licks 2A guitar lick is a phrase (a short musical idea) made up of a series of notes that you can use and incorporate into your soloing and improvisation. You can also see it as a small part or fragment of an entire solo. Good licks can add magic, excitement and drama to your solos.

Learning, memorizing, dissecting, rebuilding and incorporating licks into your playing is such a great investment in your guitar learning process. It will enhance, expand and upgrade your soloing in many ways.

The variety of licks is infinite. They come in all shapes & sizes, styles, moods, tempos, timings, keys and levels of playing, so it’s important that you learn why and how to use them.

Let’s start to take a look at the 8 vital reasons to learn guitar licks: Continue Reading

Cooler Pentatonics and Licks Adding The Major Third

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The pentatonic scale is an awesome scale. It’s a fairly easy scale and it can be used for almost every style of music: blues, country, pop, rock and more.

That’s why most guitar players use it most of the time. Great nothing wrong with that.

But wouldn’t it be nice if you could add a few notes to the minor pentatonic scale to give it more flavor and spice up your playing?

Well today we’re going to add the major third to the minor pentatonic scale. The major third will bring some happy, fresh and lively color to the table. Adding extra notes to the pentatonic scale is a common thing in soloing and will make your playing a lot more fun and interesting to listen to.

I’ll show you how to play the 5 pentatonic scales shapes / positions adding the major third and 5 licks to spice up your playing.

THEORY
The major third is a musical interval and is the distance between the root and the third note of the major scale. It also consists of four semitones (4 frets).

For example: Continue Reading

Double Stops and Blues Licks Around The Entire Neck

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A double stop is when you play two notes at the same time, also called “dyads” (you might have heard of the more familiar term “triads” where you play three notes at the same time).

While solos usually consists of single note lines, you can give your phrasing some extra colour and more chunk by playing some double stops here and there.

Double stops is just guitar slang for “harmonic intervals”. An interval is the distance between any two notes and harmonic means simultaneously sounding tones. Harmonic intervals can be played in thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths and sevenths.

You can hear them a lot in rock and blues and guitar players love using them to enhance their soloing.

Here are two examples of classic blues double stop guitar intros:

Cold shot – Stevie Ray Vaughan

Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry

You can apply harmonic intervals to every scale, but today we’re focusing on playing fourths in the A minor pentatonic scale. The application of fourths is one of the most used double stops in blues and rock.

In the tabs below you can see that almost every two notes are on the same fret, so you need to bar two strings with either your first finger (index finger), third finger (ring finger) or fourth finger (pinky). Continue Reading