Country guitar players tend to use techniques that include flat picking, finger picking and hybrid picking. They also use open strings and licks played in the open position. A lot of string bends and finger slides are also employed. The building blocks that form country guitar’s vocabulary are the major and minor pentatonic scales, the major scale and the Mixolydian mode, major and minor chords (and their corresponding arpeggios), dominant sevenths and ninths, and the judicious use of chromatic passing tones. CLICK HERE FOR THEW PAGE TO THIS LESSON. 

Blues licks are essential for every guitar player. This blues lick is being played in 8 keys starting on the key of G, moving in half steps up to D on the tenth fret, and back down. Players such as Albert Collins, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Bonamassa. Hammer-ons, pull-offs are the important techniques you will use in this style of playing. The most important thing here though is phrasing.

Some people call it developing your “bag of tricks” Once you can play the lick from the third position, practice moving up and down the neck in half steps with the videos. Start slow!

Visualize the pentatonic scale as you switch between the different keys. CLICK HERE FOR THE PAGE TO THIS LESSON 

The blues scale is a really useful tool to building any guitarists soloing and melodic vocabulary. Blues, rock, metal, country, and jazz, no matter the style this scale is extremely useful. An easy way to look at this scale is to take the minor pentatonic scale and add the flat 5th degree to the it. In the key of A minor an E flat is added to the scale.

The intervals for the minor pentatonic scale 1, b3, 4, 5, b7 A, C, D, E, G

The Intervals for the blues scale 1, b3, 4, b5, 5, b7 A, C, D, Eb, E, G,

This exercise is designed to help to learn, practice and connect all five patterns of this scale across the whole neck and also strengthen your legato playing as well. A good place to start with this is to make sure you have a decent grasp of the five patterns of the minor pentatonic scale, then simply add the E flat to each pattern. CLICK HERE FOR THE PAGE TO THIS LESSON. 

Soloing over a jazz blues is a challenging and also rewarding goal for any guitarist. To navigate a progression like this means to be able to outline seventh, minor, and diminished chords with scales and arpeggios with jazz and blues phrasing. Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino, and Pat Metheny are all great players that are amazing in this style. This idea with this exercise is to give you a mix of licks and phrases that can help you build your own vocabulary for soloing on the guitar. CLICK HERE FOR THE PAGE TO THIS LESSON.

Of all the guitar techniques, tapping is probably the most potent when it comes to making high speed interval jumps, scale movements, polyphony and polyrhythms. Tapping is a legato technique which means it incorporates hammer-ons and pull-offs for tone production.  When delving into the art of two-hand tapping, the first thing you need to remember is to start slow.

This exercise covers variations on an Am7, Cmaj7, Gmaj6, Dmin7, Fmaj9 chords. You want to start by outlining each chord type separately, and then as you improve on the patterns connecting them into one long sequence. CLICK HERE FOR THE PAGE TO THIS LESSON. 

As a guitarist, why would you bother to learn other guitarists licks? What could you gain from it? Shouldn’t you just work at making your own? If one of your purposes for picking up the guitar in the first place was to have an instrument to communicate with, you’re going to need to spend time learning the languages.

In this exercise we are working on eight licks that are not only very useful, but also quite common. There are a ton of important techniques here, oblique bends/double stops, rolling rock/blues ideas, quarter, half, whole step bends, sliding sixths, mixing major/minor pentatonic. CLICK HERE TO THE PAGE FOR THIS EXERCISE.

Three note per string licks and scales are generally used for speed. Whenever you hear a guitar player playing these really fast terrifying licks, it’s probably a three note per string lick. Paul Gilbert, and  Joe Satriani a couple of many great experts in this field. This is a three octave legato run that moves though five keys starting in the key of G.  CLICK HERE FOR THE PAGE FOR THIS LESSON.