Okay, we've covered an awful lot of ground in this little blues course.
It's really important that you practice the right things to make the most of your practice time
and to make sure that you really digest this information.
So, what should you be doing?
Well, the first thing that needs to go into your practice schedule
is to learn the licks.
Of course you need to learn the scale positions as well : they go around the licks
but definitely knowing the licks for each position is really important.
So it's worth practicing each one up.
Really working on trying to make it sound good.
Not just getting the notes right
but thinking about how loud and soft you pick the notes.
The whole dynamic feel of it, whether you really give it some aggression,
or whether it's soft and delicate, that kind of thing.
That makes a huge difference to the way people can project through their playing.
So, learning your licks, getting the licks down right,
is the first thing that you should be worried about.
The next thing is making sure that you use them.
Now what I recommend for all of my students is that you use a backing track.
Now, if you're lucky enough to be in a band and you can practice using the licks with a band
then that's the best thing ever but not everyone has that luxury,
so a backing track is a pretty close second.
Now, there's backing tracks available from my site, including a couple of free ones,
so use those. There's plenty around on the Internet
so just look about and find yourself some backing tracks to jam to.
It's really important.
The ones that you'll get from my site are 5 minute long,
which is a good amount of time to practice one lick.
Now I did talk about this in an earlier lesson, in Blues Lead Guitar, Volume One
but just to reiterate it here, take one lick that I've given you
and use it as many different times,
as many different ways as you can for a whole five minutes.
What you'll find is that after the first minute
you've used everyway that you can possibly think of to play the lick.
And that way you'll start really pushing your boundaries of the ways that you can use that lick.
It's also worth, within that five minutes,
maybe towards the last part of it, the last minute or so,
linking up with some other licks that you already know from that position.
So you can sit there and go from one lick and then smoothly into another lick
and then back to the first lick or whatever. Letting them blend.
Because what you don't want is to have:
Here's the licks that you've learned on this DVD or from wherever else,
and when you play, it's got nothing to do with that collection of licks.
You have to try and blend them in to your playing
so that they naturally just come out whenever you play your pentatonic.
That's kind of the point.
As well as doing that, you might want to add to your playing schedule,
after you've done all of these individual licks in individual positions
would be linking positions and practicing moving from one place to another place
and using those slides to join them together or shifts or using the same note.
A good idea is just to pick one specific thing and practice that.
So, either practice moving from one position to another position that's right next door
or, practice jumping from one end of the neck to the other end of the neck
and back to the middle somewhere, really jumping around a lot.
But really trying to find the thing, it is that you're going to practice
and then work on that one thing over and over.
Okay, now, the other really, really big question that people have is
"You've taught me loads of stuff about playing in the key of A
but I want to play in other keys too."
Actually, you have to play in other keys and it's really, really important.
But the reason that I taught you everything in the key of A is so that
you really start to understand each position.
Now, once you can play, for example, position one.
You've learned your licks in position one in the key of A
and you've done your homework and you've really got it sounding good.
Now, if you want to move that to the key of C, all you need to do is move the root note.
And this is why I keep going on all the time, through all my lessons,
about the importance of knowing which note is the root note.
Because all you have to do is to move that root note to the note of your new key
and you've got your new scale.
For example, position one in A was around the 5th fret.
If you wanted to play in C,
you simply move that whole bunch of stuff up to the 8th fret
because the root note for the key of C is the note C, 8th fret, 6th string.
And then you can play all of your position one licks.
You'll find that a little bit weird at first
because you've been playing so much in the key of A.
So what you want to start again with is just playing position one.
Get use to playing position one in your new key.
When you feel confident with that, maybe try going from position one up into position two,
back to position one, up to position two, back to position one,
and start to see that they kind of link together.
And because you've already done it in the key of A
you will find it quite easy, I'm sure, to link through all your different positions
if you've done your homework in the key of A well enough.
Which I'm hoping you will have done.
Other things we need to talk about quickly : new licks.
I've given you a bunch of licks but Eric Clapton certainly didn't learn licks from a DVD
by some weird Tasmanian guy who teaches via the Internet.
You learn licks from records.
The sooner you get transcribing and listening to your favorite BB King
or Eric Clapton or whoever you like's album
and trying to work out their licks. That's what you should be doing.
That is the real way to learn to play blues guitar and there's no substitute for it.
I've given you a really good course that I think will help you on your way
but you need to transcribe things.
There's no question, you must do that
if you want to end up being even a competent guitar player,
(it) has to be transcribing stuff.
Now to help you with that, I have a product, which I'm not saying you have to buy
you can be using your own CDs like Clapton CDs or whatever if you like but I've got this thing,
this really useful blues solos pack where I recorded five different solos
in the style of five different guitar players and they progressively get harder
and they use a mixture of the different pentatonic scales and they're full of licks.
I picked each guitar player's (twenty, whatever) favorite licks
and then squashed them all into a new solo, made a backing track and recorded it.
So I've made sure they're pretty straight-forward to transcribe
and you get the tabs as well so after you've transcribed it,
like worked it out by ear yourself, you can then check it against my transcription
and make sure that everything's okay.
So, that's a really, really important thing that you do next is work on your own licks.
Mega, mega important.
One last thing, there is another note that you will find crops up quite a lot in blues,
In the key of A, this is the note C#.
And the reason this note is there is because it comes from an A7 chord.
but whenever you use that note particularly, it only fits over the A7 chord
and in a blues, hopefully you remember that it's got the chords A, D and E.
Or A7, D7 and E7.
Any licks that use the note C# only sound good over the A chord.
So the reason they're not covered here
is because these things, they're called chord specific licks,
and they're going to get covered in Advanced Blues Lead Guitar
which will be coming to you very soon.
So, don't stress about that. If you want a quick snippet of what I'm talking about
you might like to check out a series of videos on my web site called 'Jazz up your blues'
which talks about this concept a bit and gives you an introduction to the use of arpeggios
which is a very cool thing to do.
Well I hope you've enjoyed this series of blues lead guitar lessons.
Be it on the DVD or if you've watched it on Youtube or through the web site.
I really hope that it helps expand your blues playing
and takes you to new, and cool, and hip places that you never thought you'd go to before.
I've seen many of my private students really progress
from being complete beginners in the lead guitar department
to really doing some pretty good quality solos.
It's all about the licks.
Okay, take care of yourselves, and I will see you again for another lesson real soon.
Bye bye.