How to play Rock and Blues Guitar

An "Essential" Lesson

From "The GuitarPrinciples
Rock & Blues Electric Guitar Foundation Course"

From a technical point of view, the first thing a student of rock & blues must learn (as far as playing leads go) is the first Minor Pentatonic Scale. After that comes string bending. Once these are learned, a student is in a position to learn real licks, and play real solos, or improvise.

What really happens is that the first Minor Pentatonic Scale is learned badly, with lots of bad finger action and tension, resulting in missed notes, inability to play fast, etc. This is because all the essentials of finger movement (many peculiar to this scale) are not known (of course, they are in my course!). Also, when asked to bend a string, the vast majority of students will proceed to assault the string in some flamboyant but useless fashion, creating a lot of effort but not much in the way of anything worth listening to!

Most students, after ineffectually learning theirs scales and bends, will then commence to commit the same injustice upon their first "guitar licks". They will randomly pick something from their favorite songs and players, and hack away at it. The result will be a greater or lesser distortion of what the rest of us would call "music", and this level of playing will, unfortunately, remain as that players fate forever after.

I know this for a fact, because over 25 years of teaching electric guitar, I have met hundreds of adults who started as teenagers, and played just as badly as adults as they did as kids. Often, they had spent their adult lives quitting the guitar in frustration, and picking it up again because they just couldn't stay away (a situation that always touches and saddens me).

The "7 Essential Licks"

Over the years, I isolated the key moves from the Pentatonic Scale that must be mastered before the door would be open for playing real rock licks in a professional manner. I found that these key moves were never taught in isolation as they need to be, and certainly not with all the micro-details that must be known and appreciated before that move could be played easily, and fluidly. I call these moves "The 7 Essential Licks".

LIke most of the really important things in life, the importance of these essential licks is largely ignored because of the very fact that they are so simple. They are taken for granted, and not paid attention to. No student is going to get very excited by being given just two notes to practice, or so goes the thinking of most guitar teachers. Well guess what: mastering those two notes will be a major step forward toward mastering larger and more complex licks. Conversely, when students have trouble with the solos they play, it is because these essential moves are not second nature to the fingers.

Essential Lick # 1

At this point, we have gotten a basic familiarity with Minor Pentatonic Scale #1. This means that we have gotten our foot in the door, so to speak, into the business of playing blues and rock guitar.

We have learned:

The first scale
The basic bends
How to use the scale for a simple lead solo and play it in time to a background accompaniment
How to play a simple 12 bar blues shuffle

Now it is time to move to the next level in our use of the scale. We are going to learn a set of "moves" with the scale, a set of short licks on the scale that are absolutely critical to master. In fact, these essential licks are used extensively in everything you will ever play. They are the "cells" of endless larger organisms and are used to make up all of the larger phrases that are used in blues and rock soloing. If you can't play these fundamental licks properly, you will NEVER sound good on the guitar.

They all build on what we have already learned about the basic bends. They use a bend in combination with one or more carefully chosen notes, to produce the characteristic sounds we are all familiar with in blues lead playing. Let's take a look at them.

Essential Lick # 1

This lick may look rather simple, but there are a whole lot of things that we have to pay attention to when we play it in order to make it sound like it is supposed to sound. Here are the steps to follow.....

To Perform Lick #1:

Bring the hand to the 12th fret, and approach the neck with the hand in bending position, ready to place the fingers down in a slanted manner, as if ready to do a bend with the 3rd finger.
Place the 1st finger on the 2nd string, 12th fret.
Place fingers 2 & 3 on the 3rd string. You now have 3 fingers down.
Hold the 1st finger in place on the 2nd string, and play the 3rd string note. Let it ring for a moment, and then begin to bend the 14th fret of the 3rd string with both fingers 2 & 3. Bend it up a whole step, so it sounds like the note 2 frets higher.
As you bend, make sure the 1st finger does not move with the 2nd string. It must remain dead still as the bend goes up, as if that finger were nailed to the fingerboard. It will want to move, but if it does, the pitch of that note will change, and the lick will be ruined.
As you bend, watch the pick. Most people tense their pick hand in reaction to the effort required for the bend. They actually tighten their grip on the pick, and what is much worse, tense their wrist and pull the pick away from the strings! DO NOT DO THAT! Do the opposite. Watch the pick and relax the pick hand while bending, and carefully bring the pick past the next string with the same motion that you played the bend, and leave the pick waiting under the string during the bend, waiting to do its up pick at the right time.

After the bent note has been bent up all the way (a whole step), let it ring for a moment, and then play the 2nd string note with an up-pick. As you do, let go of the 3rd string, but keep it quiet- it will make a lot of noise when you let go, unless you do 2 things:

Let it go gently, lifting the fingers slightly so the sound stops, and the fingers deaden the string as they lift.

Mute the lower string with the side of the hand if necessary as you play the 2nd note.

See Essential Licks 1-4

	New!! THE GUITAR PRINCIPLES ROCK & BLUES ELECTRIC GUITAR FOUNDATION COURSE 74.95...Buy Now! Finally, there is a course that shows you what you REALLY need to know to be good on electric guitar....
Scales - all 5 Minor Pentatonic Scales with GOOD, sensible, and usable fingering (unlike what is found in most methods)	Bending & Vibrato - The inside details on the mechanics of a good bending and vibrato, and practice routines that will enable you to master this essential skills.
Licks - THE essential licks from each scale with detailed video explanations, fingering, pick strokes, etc.	Muting, Damping, and Raking - Practice routines for developing string muting, string damping, and string raking.
Theory - The music theory behind the Pentatonic Scales. You will understand why certain notes get bent, why certain notes sound bluesy and good, and how to use each note of the scale in a musical way. NO NOTE READING NECESSARY!	Solos - A solo for each scale, illustrating the use of each lick, PLUS audio and video, FAST and SLOW with detailed verbal explanations and visual demonstrations of not just what the licks look and sound like, but how to train your fingers to do it too!
Technique - All you need to know about the micro-details of finger action when playing Pentatonic Scales & Licks. This information is NEVER given in existing instructional materials. You will learn Proper Hand & Finger Positions for all situations, as well as the details of Finger Movement in scales and licks.