Pure Pentatonic Power: Rock and Blues Lead Guitar Course

A performance of Lick 1 with the jam track played at 3 different speeds. With a quick bit of revision for box 1 of your A Minor pentatonic scale

Here is the first lick of the course. It is in the key of A Minor/ C Major Pentatonic. You will find the tablature included in downloadable PDF format and the MP3 Jam Tracks (with different speeds) in the same key as the first 4 licks. It's a Blues/ Rock lick featuring some climbing and descending patterns, legato, picking, slides and double stops. It isn't too fast and has a steady pace, so a good place to begin.

Featuring the double stop again and a call and response repetitive lick, we also have a classy Jimmy page style lick in triplets and an introduction the Blues' note/ Blues scale. We venture out into "Shape 2" of the Pentatonic boxes. Little bit faster now!

Our first look at unison bends and some classic, Chuck Berry, Van Halen and Hendrix influenced passages! Stacking patterns over E, B, G strings and using three shapes now with an effective ascending lick to finish. You can easily split these licks into bite size chunks as there is a lot going on here.

An exercise in phrasing, Lick 4 evokes the sound and feel of greats such as Paul Kosoff and Eric Clapton. This one is more about "how you say it" than "how much you say"! Well controlled vibrato and perfectly pitched bends will have this one sounding top notch!

Into D Minor/ F Major now with this essential climbing patterns in triplets. Though it may look complicated, once you understand the pattern, you will fly through it with ease and climb your fretboard with masterful control. I have added a couple of phrasing ideas in there also, just to break the pattern up a bit and keep things interesting. This licks pattern will be a revelation if you have never used these sequences before. You will be soloing for days!

Staying almost exclusively in box 1 of the Pentatonic scale, we add the Blues note in two positions creating the Blues scale box. This is then added into our triplet pattern in a descending fashion finishing in box 5. The lick is influenced by the late, great Randy Rhoads here and has a hard rock feel. It will work equally well over blues too!

Beginning with a rapid fire unison bend licks and finishing with some fast legato blues, this is lick is quite rapid and complex. Start slow, take one piece at a time and build up speed! The vibe here is Michael Schenker!

A modern sounding speed lick that sounds more difficult than it is. It has a certain pattern of picking and hammer ons/ pull offs. As long as you get one pattern down, it will flow. Make sure you are picking in the right direction and your legato is on time and precise.

A Pentatonic and Blues scale course would surely not be complete with some open string E Minor licks summoning Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan! Here we have just that, old school blues licks that are fundamental in all styles of guitar playing. This style has long stood the test of time and has been passed from generation to generation from Robert Johnson, Hendrix, Beck, Page right through to modern players like Zakk Wylde and Joe Bonnamassa. Enjoy and work on your own licks too!

We stick with the old school blues style but work ourselves up the guitar neck and through the Pentatonic/ Blues patterns. Eventually finishing one octave higher than where we started the lick.

With lick 11I have fused some ideas from Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan and added my own twist too. We have some ascending and descending patterns here and some rapid fire open string licks with some string skipping. Take it slowly because some parts are a little tricky. Build up speed phrase by phrase.

To finish our E Minor section we move into shape 1 (the higher octave) and spice things up with some wide interval licks. A more modern approach in the style of bands like Metallica and players such as Joe Satriani/ Paul Gilbert.

So back into A Minor/ C Major for our final 4 licks. Lick 13 covers both our "country" unison bends (think Hotel California) and also a nice ascending pattern in quadruplets similar to a pattern used by Slash in the Sweet Child o' Mine solo. A great pattern for getting up your scale in 4's without tripping over your fingers. A little bit of double picking is involved, so again, start slow and build up speed. A metronome can also help.

Lick 14 begins with some cool melodic phrasing licks that climb up our patterns on the D and G strings, giving a Thin Lizzy vibe, building to a descending crescendo pattern in quadruplets. The lick is structured, not only to sound good, but too also teach you essential shapes and sequences.

Lick 15 is in a quadruplet feel, but in our first phrase we add in a triplet to create a quick flourish of speed. Then we come down our scale in what seems like a simple descending idea, but in reality, we skip over adjacent strings in 4th intervals creating a way more interesting sound. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top was known to use this trick, i call it the "lean over" as you can sometime roll your knuckle over to the next string to catch the 4th.

The lick contains some bluesy bends that sound easy but be aware it's the tiny touches and attention to nuance that give the distinct flavour. Our final phrase incorporates slides to move though 3 shapes smoothly.

Easy to remember but tricky to play. Here we are using a 3 note per string pattern to climb through the scale shapes. We have some big stretches creating wide intervals. A technique used to great effect in many hard rock/ heavy metal songs. Popular with the 80's super shredders like George Lynch and Jake.E.Lee etc