Welcome back! Today I wanna show you 2 awesome electric guitar licks. The licks I’m about to show are challenging. If you somehow manage to play them, your friends or follower will for sure be extremely impressed. We all look at videos of great guitar players like Guthrie Govan, Steve Vai, John Petrucci and wonder “how do they come up with stuff like this?” “how are they able to achieve such complex and intense licks?”.
Well, a lot of it is knowing how to combine different techniques into one awesome sounding lick. The first chop we are gonna try out is a Blues/Dorian scale inspired lick and it uses legato as well as hybrid picking. Let’s check it out:
Looks easy right? Now try playing it at 140bpm, haha. It gets complicated. I personally think that
the key to master lines like the one I showed you above, is to know how to use legato without a
lot of distortion; yeah that’s right. Turn on your amp and lower the distortion knob, now try doing
any type of legato. It is harder right? That’s because distortion makes things easy. If you lower
your distortion, your fingers will need to develop more strength and eventually they’ll get
stronger and you’ll be able to play licks like the one above at higher tempos.
Now let’s check out another great sounding lick:
This is another example of how playing with a lower distortion lever helps you develop a faster
legato technique. I would you suggest playing a downstroke for the 1st and 3rd note, so it
almost feels like you are playing 2 downstrokes in a row because the notes in between are
basically being pulledoff.
This lick is so cool that you can actually transpose it all across the fretboard; in fact you could just use the same exact pattern and start it around the 5th fret and chromatically transpose it up towards the 12th fret where it’s originally written.
This is all for today. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and please remember to check out more videos at:
