The most useful guitar lick I ever learned

this is the most useful guitar lick that I have ever learned in all my many years of playing guitar [Music] really that's it just that it's very simple but I'll tell you it's like a launching pad to hundreds of other great sounding licks and it allows us to connect a chord shape with scale shapes that we know well so that we can use it in solos and we can use it in guitar rhythm playing and have those scales connect to the chords in really cool and interesting ways [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you so let's look at why this lick is so useful and then we'll explain you how you can do it and how you can connect the chord shapes to the easy pentatonic shape and create all kinds of different cool lines we're starting here in C major and I'm just using this really basic C major bar chord you know sometimes I'll if I'm really diligent I'll use all the fingers to get that Barre chord and sometimes I just do that double bar system I call it because we're only going to be here for a second in this case so we're just going to hit the root slam the chord so I might not be so careful to use all the fingers on that chord the root that's C hit the chord now I'm going to hit the root again take the note that's a whole Step Above D which is the fifth fret and slide that up two Frets that takes me to an E note so we put that together [Music] that e note is now the major third of the C chord because a c chord is c e g or variations of that right so when I reach that e note it still sounds very connected to the C chord because the E is part of the C chord right and then often what we'll do is we'll hit this next note here which is a g and guess what the G note is also in a c chord right because G chord because c chord is c e g easy that's basically the lick and why is it so important because it connects this chord shape with this scale shape this scale shape is C major pentatonic it comes from the eighth fret of your low E string there and it's our easy shape I always call this the easy shape because it's the shape that almost all of us learn first you probably learned this shape first but you probably learned it as a minor pentatonic right remember that a minor pentatonic has the same notes as C major pentatonic they are relative major and minor but in this case because we're playing in the key of C and we're slamming on that c chord we want the sound of C major pentatonic so it's coming from that eighth fret there right so once I hit this chord and do the lick which is like a launch into this pentatonic shape now I have all my easy favorite pentatonic licks that I can play in here I have my favorite band right that favorite band that everyone does in this case is on the seventh fret of the G string so I can hit the chord launch up now I've got my my favorite Lake there right or whatever you like [Music] you can play around in that pentatonic you can add the Blue Notes in [Music] Right add some patterns whatever now it's very common to connect this little sequence to whatever is the next chord in the song right so we're going to pretend we're playing a song that goes C Major D Minor just for fun right it works out really great with this sequence because my C major of course we know it's here we already did that I do my lick and now my D minor or D minor seven is right there it's in that space still anyway right so now I can hit my D minor seven chord and still play around with my scale shape back to C T minor [Music] blue note C Major [Music] D minor [Music] see how easy it becomes to connect chord shapes with scale shapes especially because I mean we love this skill shape right nice and easy so now let's explore another really common way to use this lick to launch from one shape of C to another shape of C so we're going to do the same launching lick but instead of hitting just that g note there I'm actually going to lay that first finger down and get three notes I've got g c e here and that GCE right it's just part of that c chord where we were GCE of that c chord but now I have that GCE with my first finger because I've done my launch now we have a bigger thicker sound for that moment that sounds really cool right try that out [Music] or if I want an even bigger sound I can in fact keep that third finger on the E note which is the seventh fret of the a string there right now I have a four string C major chord which would actually be called c e why is it called c e because it's still a c chord but it has e as its lowest pitch right that all Rings really nicely together and of course now I'm launched into my favorite pentatonic shape and now that I'm in my favorite pentatonic shape you'll notice that the pentatonic shape still includes that g that c and that e so in fact if I want to be a little Jimi Hendrix about it I can kind of just leave that finger hanging out there and be kind of quite liberal with my pick and strike not just one string at a time but strike kind of two-ish strings at a time so that I'm also including some of the GCE of that c chord there right we put that in context my C chord in my launch you can hear everybody kind of ring and jangle together whoops not that one though these kind of hammer-ons work really well for this kind of technique too right go to your T minor foreign it's so easy to get back to the cord and now we are able to connect the chords to the scales and in fact we could be like almost a one-man band in a sense by doing both soloing and chords at the same time it's D Minor back to C right [Music] D minor [Music] D minor [Music] [Applause] and now before we move up the fretboard I'm going to tell you about my book it's called guitar soloing like a pro and it's available on Amazon it has tons of tricks for how you can improve your soloing by choosing notes that are connected with the chords underneath and I also have guitar strumming like a pro for All You acoustic guitar fans out there okay now let's move up the fretboard so we know this trick launches us into the easy pentatonic shape right and we're connecting it with a D minor chord I mean it might have been anything else right it might have been a different chord it might have been the IV chord it might have been an F in this case because as we all know it's all my students here in Vancouver know f is the four chord of C right because c d e f Now watch how these connect so easily I can do the launch from c [Music] a little lick whatever [Music] and then jump up to the F chord which is right there the eighth fret and it's the same shape as that c chord right so as soon as I see that chord shape I always know I I feel like oh fantastic I can do the trick I can do the launch right there I can do it on the F chord [Music] right so now we've connected the one chord with the four chord so here's the one chord c f [Music] back to C major right thirds F [Music] the trick works on the IV chord because again just when we do the launch it puts us in pentatonic shape and in this case it's the pentatonic shape of F major so it's F major pentatonic but whenever we have a major chord we can use the major pentatonic scale of that chord so look at how handy this is what we've now done is we've managed to change scales mid song without really having to think at all we didn't barely have to think because using this launching lick it takes us directly into the easy shape for that chord right let's take it one step further what if I go to the V chord I can do the same thing on the V chord of course right so if my f is there my four chord is there my five chord is always two Frets up so here's G same lick we just launch into the G shape [Music] [Applause] [Music] let's see [Music] I couldn't couldn't help myself there now we have a really cool style where we're playing soloing lines and we're playing chords you can do this just play it on your own uh you can do this as the rhythm guitar player if someone else say someone's playing acoustic guitar just strumming c c c c c c c easy you don't necessarily need to do that if you're the second guitar player you know especially if you're on acoustic guitar you want to maybe make some more interesting lines now if someone's saying over top of that you might not want to be too busy you might not want to be it depends on the genre right but certainly we can keep it simple remember that you have the inversion chord on top as well right so it's from C that inversion chord just that alone as a rhythm guitar player makes a c chord or an F chord or a G chord so interesting if I use that alone let me play through c f and g and we see it's far more interesting than just staying in place right so here's the C foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and notice that you can just go up and back down again right [Applause] f [Music] g f c foreign I got this lick originally I got it from George Harrison when I was a kid I wanted to learn the solo to let it be and it has pretty much this kind of run-up not necessarily he doesn't play a chord in it right but he has this this little lick and um I don't know if I realized the full usage of it at the time but boy do I ever use it a lot I never get tired of playing this thing like ever I use it anytime I'm one one of these chord shapes as long as it looks like this I can launch into that it does not work on a minor chord right so if the song underneath is a minor chord it doesn't work because if I play C minor when we do the launch remember that the launch takes us up to an E note which is the major third so it doesn't quite work in minor we could change it that's kind of cool but it doesn't it doesn't take us into an easy pentatonic shape anyway so it doesn't quite work right so remember to like And subscribe please share this video and tell your friends we're getting really close to being monetized for this Channel and that was my goal to at very least get monetized and then we'll see what the algorithms do for us and hopefully you guys are enjoying this material if there's anything in particular you want let me know maybe I can make a video about that and if you're in the Vancouver area give me a shout because that's where I teach lessons here in this studio in east Vancouver in Canada so you can check us out at www.bluemorris.com and remember don't forget that I have don't forget that I've got these great books guitar soloing like a pro and guitar soloing like a pro other way around and guitar strumming like a pro both of which are available on Amazon thanks very much we'll see you next time

Channel: GuitarLessonsVancouver

Views: 109,373

Keywords: guitar lesson, guitar lick, guitar chords, guitar scales, electric guitar

Id: ZXIvF2ARZxA

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 12 2022