Sol Philcox is back! He’s not only amazing at “Chicken-Pickin Style”, but
he’s a heck of a blues player too, with a deep bag of secrets to share with you.
Here’s a sample clip from the upcoming “Blues Master Class” DVDs.
See how that works? You can use that sliding technique. This is almost like a country-type thing. Let me just show you this one little trick of how to combine slides to get from one point to another.
You’ll be hammering-on from this note; 6th fret. We’re out of our pentatonic position here, just in case you’re confused. We’ve actually gone down from it. Here we went up; here we’re going down from our — going 6th fret.
So we’ve got our 6th fret, we’re going to hammer-on on the A-string to the 8th fret. Then, we’re going to slide this up. We’re not going to re-pick the note, we’re just going to slide right after the hammer-on. We’re going to go from 8 to 10.
Let’s carry it on by playing our 7th to our root, 8th fret to 10th fret, D-string. Then, we’re going to play our 3rd on the 8th fret on the G-string. We’re not going to tweak it; we’re just going to play it, and we’re going to do it exactly what we did with this part.
Notice it’s the same notes, just in different order. So jumping between them by going, that’s our little bridge right there. Then, we can finish it off by going from our 7th to our root on the B-string, getting out of that pentatonic position. The way we did the first time around. And that is the same as…
Same note, different octave.
Now, that’s not so much a lick. You wouldn’t want to play that in a solo because it sounds too much like an exercise. It sounds kind of routine. But if you break it up a little bit and kind of go back on yourself and then jump forward in the lick, you can get this kind of thing. You can go back, like completely reverse it.
That’s how you build speed by playing blues. It’s not fast picking. I mean, that sounds great when you’re playing rock or metal or whatever, but you lose some of the articulation; you lose that human element when it gets too mechanical and you’re just playing every note with the pick.
Like I said earlier, just utilize these bends, the slides and the hammer-on to get the most out of these licks and build up speed as well. If you want to play fast.
