Lick of the Week 10

Lick of the week # 10
Tutorial

Rob Schumann: So this your lick of the week and once again this is sort of a Blues-Rock lick; something you could use in a nice up beat blues or something you could use in a Rock song. In this case, it's a turnaround lick, you can never have too many of those and in this instance, it would be a turnaround lick in the key of A. Well, I will show you how to put it in some other keys as well.

When we are in A, our turnaround is going to be over an E7 chord going to a D7,so that is a five chord, going to the 4 and some of our past licks of the weeks have been over that same progression. In this case, this is one that I like to keep in my back-pocket; it's great for those 48 bar, 12 bar blues solo, we just have to go on forever. One thing that you really want to avoid, is running out of material and have people just seeing you and watching your Rambo through that 12 bar blues change and then, your band leader tells you to take another chorus and everybody is just sitting there, rolling their eyes, waiting for the vocalist to come back in. you want to keep your solo nicely contoured so that you have some peaks and valleys to keep people's interest.

So well, this is great for us, maybe, the first and second chorus going into another part of your solo, you can keep up the level of intensity and this one sort of has like a climax that makes people kind of want more but it also moves you into some different positions of the neck, which I really like. So you could be finishing up the calm part of your solo down and just reach into the neck around the fifth fret and you want to bend some higher notes and get up into a higher register and this one sort of helps you navigate the front board in a really tasteful way rather than just shifting positions.

So let's dissect it a little bit and I will show you how to play it. Basically, we are starting on that E7 chord, so I am going to do a little grace note slide from the seventh fret on the fourth string down to the sixth fret and what's that doing, is getting me ready to outline an arpeggio of this E7 chord. So basically, I am hitting sixth, the fourth fret on the third string and then, the fifth fret on the second string, those are the notes on an E7 chord; we have got a G#, a B and an E, so those are 3 other notes out of there. So I am just outlining those in that order. Then I am sliding from the sixth fret on the third string with my third finger up to the seventh fret on the third string and that's getting me onto a D note which is the flat 7 note of an E7, so I am still outlining the chord, but now instead of playing arpeggios like I just was, I am going to start outlining these using a sixth interval, and so that's where I am skipping over a string. 6's are used all the time in blues solos. So, in this case, I am going to be doing something like this. So I am hitting that flat7 on the seventh fret and that's the D note and I am hitting a B, which is the fifth of the chord with my fourth finger and a lot of times when you play 6's, it's really cool to use hybrid picking in your right hand. So in this case, I am using my pick to pluck that third string and then, using the middle finger of the right hand, to pluck that first string. And you could let those ring together, it depends how much of overdrive you have on, I have got a lot of gain/drive on right now. Seventh maybe a little bit more grid on there than I want, so I may want to let off that third finger by the time I get to the fourth finger. Then I am going to take that third finger and slide from seven back down to five. And then when I get there, I will use the fourth finger to do the same shape and hit the fifth fret on the first string. This is setting me up for the D7 chord. So if you think about it, this C would be the flat7 of a D-chord and of a D7 and this fourth finger will grab the fifth there. So, I am basically kind of outlining the chords that way. So I grab that fifth fret there using hybrid picking once again and then I will pick that fifth fret again on the third string and this time, I will do a huge slide all the way up to the eleventh fret of the third string.

So, so far we had this and once I get up here, I use the second finger of my left hand to get the tenth fret on the first string. And basically this, I kind of lot bring together and put some vibrato on there, or slams, I will pick both notes little bit to accent them, something like that and that gives you kind of a gritty sound over that D7. So that follows our 5-chord and 4-chord; one more time a little slower.

Now we are ready to go back to the one chord and a lot of times, a blues change will go from the one chord back to the 5 one more time before you start over. This part, I am kind of doing a chromatic climb with that sixth shape and this sort of gives you some tension and whenever you have tension in a solo, you also get a chance to release it and so that's the cool thing here is we are setting it up for another solo to start and try to keep your audience from getting bored.

So, in this case what I do is, on the third finger hitting the twelfth fret of the third string and the fourth finger hitting the twelfth fret of the first string. I am going to mute the second string by leaning the third finger back and I am going to hit that twice and slide off of it and then slide back in and hit 13 with the same shape and you see how that has kind of a nasty sound to it, gives you some real grit. So I do twelve, I will hit that twice, then go to 13, then 14. Now once I get to 15, here is where I will do some trimalar picking and this is just a, gives some fast notes, so what I am going to do is do that same shape while I am using the second string. I am also going to try to use the tip of my third finger to mute this fourth string, so it doesn't sound, try not to get that harmonic on, that will then sound kind of nasty. I am going to try to mute that and then what I am going to do, is just strum as fast as I can on that fifteenth fret and really you can think about this sixteenth note, one and a two and a three and a -- and that sets me up for my next change.

So whether you have got your a 5-chord or 4-chord there at the end of your 12 bars, you can use that to create some tension and then now you are firmly established up in this region of the fret board, if we are going back to one chord which we usually are, in the next progression, you can take this fifteenth fret here on the first string and bend that up-to the 1 and just slide that ring, you could come in with a lick on the next section, would be something like and then to the rest to your solo.

So let me play that lick at half speed and then we will look at some ways to take it in to different keys. Then onto our next chorus.

So let's look at how to transpose this then. This particular one was in the key of A's we said, so we are following the 5-chord on E. if we were in the key of E, for example where E was our one chord and we were having to get a 5-chord of B, we could transpose the lick by taking it a string towards the ceiling or onto the fifth string instead. So our fingerings are just going to change a little bit in this case. What you generally try to do is, you try to hit the third of the chord that you are playing over, so for playing over the 5-chord, we will try to hit the third of that chord. So if were a B, we will be trying to hit a D#; well I have got a D# right here, sixth fret of the fifth string. The only thing that's going to change is this arpeggio shape, instead of looking like this, I might have to change that shape because of the odd tuning of the second string. So in this case, I would have sixth fret, fourth fret, fourth fret on the fourth string and third string. And then actually all the other fingerings would stay the same and you will notice that this is on a little lower of a string, so we don't have that quite as high of a sound as we did on those first and third strings before, if we were doing this. So you may want to use just the first part of the lick and figure out a different ending to it in that instance. So that would be in the key of E; i

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