| Cooking Guitar
Licks Part 1 By J. Ross |
Free
guitar lessons from GuitarMadeSimple.com |
There comes a time for almost
every guitarist when he or she finds themselves going back to
the same licks over and over. Getting stuck in doing the same
techniques, scales, or positions is a very common situation for
musicians who are trying to develop their own style and distinctive
sound. When cooking up fresh guitar licks, using slides, bends,
hammer-ons as "spices" will add flavor to bland musical
lines. Let's look at a few examples. Assume the guitar is in standard
tuning (E, A, D, G, B, E), and no external effects (wah-wah, chorus,
delay) are going to be used, as the idea here is to think about
creative playing techniques rather than electronics ; therefore,
these tips will apply to both acoustic and electric guitars.
Let's say we're about to play lines based in the D major scale
(D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D). Here is an example of a typical guitar
lick using these notes:
It's a pretty straightforward lick, using
standard picking. Let's see how this can be spiced up using
the technique of
Slides:
This lick still fills the space of two
bars, and still uses the D major scale. It is at the same tempo,
and in the same tuning. The slides, however, add a fluid feel
to the lines and keep them from being so rigid.
We can build upon this use of the sliding
technique, and extend notes from the same scale, but into a higher
octave, using more of the fretboard, as seen in the following
example:
Once again, we have a two-bar
section based on D, and at a medium tempo. With the simple idea
of extending the scale into the next higher octave, and incorporating
the slides as in the second example, we have an entirely different
sound and "flow" to the stagnant lick in the first
example. Moving into different octaves is a very creative way
to keep the motion of music from getting stale. One-position
lines tend to sound too repetitive in a short period of time;
whereas the same lick played in multiple octaves sounds fluid
and alive. The next example shows how a simple, four-note pattern
(8th notes) can be extended into octaves to freshen the movement
of a D major lick, and incorporates some string-skipping, as
well:
Now, we'll see what a normal,
boring D major scale can be turned into when spiced up with
our flavorful slides, octave jumping, and string skips/position
changes. Here's a line I cooked up for you adding the spices
we've been analyzing, to demonstrate just how different you
can make even a plain old major scale run sound. It's a four-bar
run based on D major. Let's just call this one "Flava."
Pretty tasty, huh? Using
these examples, it's easy to see how applying very simple techniques
to stale, one-position guitar lines can really add some taste
and come across as fresh and different.
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