00:00hi this is richard barrett for guitarist magazine welcoming you to another blues headlines
00:04this time i've gone for what i think of as a modern blues approach certainly with a tip of
00:09the hat to joe bonamassa maybe a little bit of eric johnson so let's have a listen to the solo
00:14and i'll be back to talk you through it
01:02as you'll have just seen and heard there's quite a lot in this i've mixed more traditional blues
01:08approach though with quite high gain with more modern in a blues context arpeggios and brushing
01:16across the strings not sweet picking but there are some more specialist picking techniques so
01:22there's quite a lot to talk through so we'd best get on with it example one is based exclusively
01:29around the shape one e minor pentatonic with a couple of additions some of those are duplicate notes
01:43we've all seen that but what i've done is i've added
01:52and actually if memory serves i've added
01:56in there as well so those f sharps give it a ninth which is a little bit more jazzy and
02:01complex and
02:02it fits great over a kind of not major or minor backing such as the riff based track that i've
02:09done so let me talk you through the thinking behind it rather than note for note through the lick or
02:15we'll
02:15be here all day really so i've played
02:26little fumble there never mind shows it's live so you can see that there's a lot of repetition
02:33i think it's more important to have an understanding about how to use this pattern than it is necessarily
02:39to duplicate what i played though there is a transcription in the magazine um so let me run through it
02:46once more
02:56one thing that i'd really like to nail though is such a bonamassa and derek johnson thing is this
03:06to go down the bottom six notes and then come back up an octave
03:15and it's a good exercise and as you can hear i'm not absolutely muting that so there's a little bit
03:20of dissonance against that low e all makes it more bluesy more authentic having worked your way
03:25through that pentatonic pattern there's just a very simple little tag at the end
03:32i'd just like to talk about your options there as well because obviously the the run with its you
03:38know loads of notes there are various ways you can do that and there are a few ways you can
03:42do a
03:43simple little phrase like this as well and i tend to lean towards doing a double stop
03:50quite like that as well so you could regard that as a little bonus lick
03:55so for this one we're staying with the same pentatonic box that e minor shape one pentatonic
04:01with a couple of notes stressed here and a c sharp added in as well we've got an a chord
04:06happening
04:06underneath so c sharp's the major third it it's not really that calculated but there's a kind of
04:17happening underneath so i feel that i can be major for a moment once we get back to e i
04:23want to become
04:23a bit more ambiguous and bluesy again but let's talk through the lick essentially a couple of high
04:29bent notes a bit of a flurry the kind of eric johnson bonamassa lick at the end which i'll walk
04:35you
04:35through and then a more of a funky sort of feel and then i'm preparing for the next lick which
04:41is
04:41a bit of a handful so let's let's go through roughly what's happening here
04:47i'm actually getting ahead of myself there's a lead in
04:59so it's going down in sixes down the pentatonic so i can talk you through that literally i'm not
05:04doing any sort of fancy sweepy type stuff um i'll run through that once more
05:20okay so that's going through it it's alternate picked then we go into the more funky
05:31i think that's pretty much exactly what i played on the solo as daft as it may sound you you
05:37sometimes
05:38can play things spontaneously within a certain framework vocabulary if you like so there are a
05:44couple of ways that i could cover that territory so let me demonstrate a couple of things just to
05:49give you an insight into the thought process it really is mostly about that double stop bend lick
06:09and the rest of the time i'm being kind of funky i'm filling the time i want something happening it
06:14doesn't need to be super melodic i'm looking for something that's got more of a rhythmic vibe really
06:19than a melodic vibe example three is more of a set piece though there are a lot of notes in
06:27it so
06:28i would suggest that you can go back and watch the video lots of times that's the luxury of youtube
06:34or
06:36if you have a look in guitarist issue 521 then there will be a note-for-note transcription with the
06:42pick strokes however um i'm going to be a little bit more helpful than that i'll talk you through
06:47the shapes and some of the thinking behind the picking because this is a mixture of brushing
06:53across the strings i hesitate to say sweet picking because this isn't shred but there's a certain
07:00amount of brushing across in a one continuous movement while fingering an arpeggio type shape
07:05and there is a little bit of alternate picking as well so let me show you the shapes essentially there
07:11are four chords in this section bar of each there's a g major an a major a c major and
07:18a d major the d
07:19major we're kind of back out into more of a pentatonic thing we've had enough of the flurry by then
07:23and
07:24it's time for a change um but the the g shape that i've used here um it's like i say
07:31brushing right
07:32across the strings with one exception where i'm going to do a hammer on on this fourth string so
07:48okay that's the idea here you can see i'm framing a g chord and then i'm going into this stretched
08:03now you will notice that there are a couple of times when i've reused my second finger my middle
08:09finger here because it just seems to make more sense i can do it more quickly otherwise you get
08:14a tangled up mess okay so that's the g shape and that's coming out of that into the a for
08:27the a i've
08:29used an f sharp minor pentatonic shape one now pretty much alternate picks though there is a skip
08:42over from the g third to the b second string and i've used a single stroke for that and then
08:47resumed
08:48alternate picking in fact i've done that a couple of times there so when you're playing down a pentatonic
08:57you can fold back over and repeat notes from the string before and when i'm doing that i like to
09:03do it with one pick stroke which is how players like joe bonomaso and eric johnson get that kind of
09:09um
09:11fluid kind of picked sound which is a bit like an arpeggio though it isn't it's a this is a
09:17scale in
09:17this case so bear that in mind and once again if you want to see exactly what's played it's going
09:23to be in
09:23issue five two one now i come down that f sharp minor pentatonic over the a chord and i time
09:32it so
09:32that i can okay so to really exaggerate that that's down to a c natural instead of the c sharp
09:41and that's
09:42meant to nail beat one of the c major chord and this is where i start being a little bit
09:48less um fancy
09:50pants about the whole thing but that's pretty much exactly it i'll go through it once more
10:06here it ends with a kind of blues lick so that's one
10:14so there's an upstroke when i get to that g
10:23and that's taking us towards example four so let's go there
10:29so for this final example i've realized that i haven't really stretched beyond this little
10:35territory of the fretboard here between the 12th and the 17th and the same is true of this final
10:41lick here we are uh shape one e minor pentatonic and then i'm coming out into shape two to finish
10:48off with a high bend you know that's how you're supposed to end these so that's right so um started
10:55this lick very much the way i've started the very first lick
11:04try to be a little bit rhythmic and kind of funky about the phrasing the rhythm's really important
11:09and then i am mindful of the fact that i want to start working my way up for that climax
11:15at the end so
11:22that's a very rough approximation of what i did so let me just play slowly through
11:26that kind of thing again and you can see the inner workings of it
11:41in fact i'm realizing just as i'm showing you that quite a lot of the time there'll be certain
11:46little passages where i'll flatten a finger and then roll it back again
11:50just to give me the flexibility to come out of it
11:59so something like that could be worth spending a little bit of time on as an isolated exercise so
12:06there we have it i hope that that's been helpful as i say these talk throughs are really designed to
12:13be
12:13referred to in conjunction with the transcription but i am able to kind of go a little bit more
12:19off-piste and give you some extra ideas so let's have a few words about tone central to everything
12:28is a vintage les paul well it's vintage to me uh 50s les paul is a bit beyond my budget
12:35but this lovely 76 turns out to be just the ticket for this kind of thing that's plugged into the
12:42studio's
12:42jtm 45 mark ii reissue and of course to get a little bit more gain and focus the mids i've
12:50used
12:50my trusty boss super overdrive so there we have it we'll have another listen to that now but as a
12:56final
12:57word let me just encourage you to play through those shapes and patterns and see what you find as
13:02well because sometimes copying another lick or learning another lick note for note can really be
13:08quite difficult to do and i found that even if i'm trying to copy what i played spontaneously
13:13suddenly i think what was i some kind of genius that day or something so um don't be discouraged if
13:20you're not finding that you're duplicating what i've done or what anyone else has done
13:24but hopefully these licks and patterns will be useful hope you enjoy see you next time
13:59you
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