Blues Guitar Licks

A great blues guitar solo is made from blues licks.

A vocabulary of blues guitar licks makes up those blocks. You make each building block up ahead of time by learning licks of the great blues guitarists one at a time until they become part of who you are.

The start of it all begins with your pentatonic and blues scales box patterns. These should be so ingrained into your fingers that they become reflex to you.

Now you can sound pretty good just taking those box patterns and playing around with them over the one, four, five, chord progressions we covered back a page or two.

Real mastery starts when you start to copy, yes copy, the greats of blues guitar that forged the trails before you.

Now I understand that you probably want to be original with your music, but even Michelangelo had a teacher.To be great, study great guitarists.

You will be following in the footsteps of people like Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones. They started this way and it didn't hamper their creativity at all.

Blues is a language, Blues Guitar licks are the words, phrases and sentences that make up that language.

Many of these licks have become so standard that there are books with hundreds of standard blues licks available. There are some really great resources for studying the greats out there.

Find these books, make sure they have a CD with them so you can not only see the licks in guitar tab, but can read the tab as you listen to the CD.

I highly recommend a program to slow down the music so you can start slow and build speed. (Recommendation will come Later) There are several good ones out there.

So what do you do with the licks after you learn them? Spend some serious time using them while playing over either some prerecorded backing tracks, classic blues songs, or your own rhythm track recordings.

I use a Line 6 spider jam and really enjoy it. It has helped me with my playing tremendously and I've had a great time using it.

More to come soon.

Be sure to check out the following related pages on this website.

1. Blues guitar chords

How simple are the basics chords needed for blues guitar?

2. Blues guitar scales - Do you know the 5 basic scale patterns in blues?

3.Guitar speed training - Mastering blues guitar licks takes fast fingers. Do you know what the pros use to get fast?

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