The Guitar Channel: Guitar Licks

Lick #7 - Brett Garsed Lick

This one is pretty tough. It's a Brett Garsed line in E Dorian from his solo on the Planet X song "Kingdom Of Dreams" from the Quantum album. It sounds to me like he plays this line in free-time (floating over the beat), so you should take the rhythm notation with a grain of salt. This is a textbook example of a typical Garsed hybrid-picking line. There's a couple of spots here where the fingering is 4 notes-per-string, and one spot in the third bar where you will do a right-hand hybrid-picking pattern of downstroke > middle finger > ring finger > pinky. Blending that pattern smoothly with the rest of the run was the toughest part for me. This line occurs 3:35 into the song.

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Lick #6 - C Minor Pentatonic Pattern

This is more of a pattern than a lick. It's based on a Brett Garsed hybrid-picking idea and uses a variety of techniques all mixed together. The entire sequence comes from the C Minor pentatonic scale. The first note of the pattern is played with a downstroke, and the next three are fingerpicked with the middle, ring, and pinky fingers. Then, after a legato pattern on the first string, you descend through the first 3 notes of the sequence using sweep-picking, and shift down to the next postion. You can sweep it both ways, or fingerpick it both ways. I use the fingerpick/sweep combination because I can't fingerpick descending patterns very well, and it sounds better to me that just sweeping the whole thing.

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Lick #5 - Jimmy Herring Lick

This great line comes from Jimmy Herring's solo on "Raging Torrent" from the Project Z album. On this tune, Jimmy solos in a general Dm tonality with alot of outside lines. This particular line starts out with a bent G note at the 15th fret. I had a hard time notating that part; basically it's a pre-bent note that you bring down for the second note of the line. He then goes into a little chromatic idea, before descending through the Gm blues scale. After going back up using a small diminished scale fragment, he descends through the Dm blues scale. I left out the picking instructions on purpose, since I have no idea how he does it. When I play it, I pick most of the notes, with some pull-offs and slides mixed in. I probably do it a little different each time I play it. I'm sure the fingering is different from what Jimmy does, but I'm confident the notes themselves are accurate. This line occurs about 1:29 into the tune.

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Lick #4 - B Minor Pentatonic Hybridpicking

Here's a fairly simple pentatonic box sequence in B minor that uses a combination of fingerpicking, downstrokes, and pulloffs. Some people call this technique "Hybridpicking". It's all done in the standard pentatonic box shape. All fingerpicked notes are plucked with the 2nd (middle) finger of the right hand (notated as 'M' in the tab above). Since this sequence uses a lot of string-skips for wide intervals, the hybridpicking method makes it easier to play than using a pick alone. For the left hand, I'm using the 1st finger for the 7th fret notes, the 3rd finger for the 9th fret notes, and the 4th finger for the 10th fret notes. This one sounds good if you mute the lower strings a little. The note's are grouped in three's, but I prefer to play this in even sixteenth notes, to give it an off kilter 3-against-4 sound.

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Lick #3 - Country/Bluegrass line

This one is a bluegrass line. This will work over the last 3 bars of a typical bluegrass progression in A.

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Lick #2 - B Minor Pentatonic run

This is a longer pentatonic run in B Minor. All alternate-picked using 3-note-per-string pentatonic fingerings. Again, there are lots of "inside" string crosses.

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Lick #1 - C# Minor Pentatonic

Here's a pentatonic alternate-picking lick. Notice when you change from the B string to the G string, you will be picking "inside" the strings. That is to say, a downstroke on the B string is followed by an upstroke on the G string.