Here’s Joey Tafolla with another cool excerpt from his “Easy Blues-Rock Licks You Can Use” course.
Rock Lick That You Can Use
Here’s a rock lick that you can use. This one is in the key of A blues and I’m going to be using my pick and my middle and my ring finger to help put this one together. I’m going to play it first for you and then we’ll break it down.
So this one has a little bit of a chicken picking style to it. I’m playing the root note of the sequence on the seventh fret with my middle finger and using a downstroke with my pick. I’m picking the high e string and the b string in an upward fashion with my ring finger and my middle finger. So we’re going to get that and what I do is I’ll do a little bit of muting to grab it so it has some air in between those two notes, and then petal tone back to the root note lay my fingers over to catch that b and g string back to the tone the root note again on the fifth fret the g and b string again and hammer to that root note or the third. And if you’ll notice I’m always going back to that root note so that’s the key right there is that a good exercise to practice that would be just that kind of a feeling that I find helpful for me is breaking down sections.
I might take one long lick break it down to three sections and then once each part is what what i would say healthy and clean then i’ll integrate them all in together this one always pedal toning back to the root and then the second note the finish would be and with a little bit of sustain some gain on that it would sound like this.
That’s a lot of fun to use in between just any type of scale you might want to tie it in with something like this so that’s something you want to put in between to break things up a bit. So what another thing you could do with that is just bring it up to different keys which again whatever key suits you’re playing the best in the key of c sharp or c would sound a little bit different now if you wanted to use this in a three note or a blues progression which is a one four five. This is something you can repeat as a theme and you’d play the first part in d or an a the next section when you hit the d would be and then back to the a and then when the progression comes up to the fifth.
So those are the kind of things that you can do when you’re playing blues find a theme and you can easily repeat those things again that would be something like this in a blues progression and it doesn’t have to be simple, it doesn’t have to be complicated, it can be really simple it doesn’t have to be fast. But this would be again in succession over a blues progression so you might want to do something like that with it.
