It's really important of course if you're playing a blues tune that you know how to start and how to finish,
and it's very often a cue that the lead guitar player will give as to weather he wants to do another round of
solos, or weather he wants to finish the song, so it's important that you learn a couple of phrases.
It's almost - if we go back to my "blues is like a language" analogy, it's important that you learn how
to say: "stop" and "keep going", so they are the two things that we are going to learn today.
Now, the actual licks that we use for intros and endings are often exactly the same, except for the chord we finish on.
Now if I just take a really, really basic, err, it's going to be the first intro and ending that we learn,
but have a listen to how the effect of the chord that I finish on changes weather it sounds like it's an ending,
or weather it's a repeating. One of the repeating ones first, it would sound like this.
. . .
You hear it wants to go - once you go to this - well it's called the five chord,
which in this blues in the key of A is an E7 chord (strums), it wants to go back to (strums) A and start again.
. . .
It doesn't feel like - if I just finish there, it would sound a bit weird.
. . .
Like you want it to keep going, you can't stop there on that five chord, it sounds weird.
Whereas if instead of going to E7 at the end I go to A7 at the end of the lick - I'm going to use that little sidestep -
I'll explain that you in a sec. again - then I'm going to do it now to an A7 chord, and it sounds like it's finished.
You almost - you couldn't keep going even if you wanted to.
. . .
It's finished. You can't keep going after that, you just can't. You could not, yeah.
so the important thing to realize here is that an intro and an ending are the same thing -
an intro is also the thing you would use to kind of continue it if you like,
it's import to realize that the only thing that's changing between those is the chord that you finish on.
So in a blues in A, if you play an A chord at the end of your blues intro or ending, then it's going to finish it.
It's going to make it into an ending. If you finish with a five chord, which is the fifth chord in the key of A, which is E7,
then that's going to mean that the lick or the tune will continue and that you want to keep something going.
So, the five licks that we are going to be looking at - five intros and endings,
I'm going to play then for now as endings, just so you can hear what they sound like and then you know of course,
that if instead of finshing with the A7 you finished with an E7 that the lick would continue going -
it would make the tune want to keep on rolling. So, here we go - the first one, I already played it to you before,
but just have a listen to it again, is this one.
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That's lick number 1.
Lick number 2 is this.
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Again, played as an ending, that's a kind of a Robert Johnson style one.
We've got another - number 3 is kind of a variation, quite similar to number 1,
very common in kind of rockabilly and stuff, which is this.
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Number 4 we've got is a really interesting one. It's in contrary motion, meaning one voice is going up,
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and one voice goes down at the same time.
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Put'em together.
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Quite an interesting sound.
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Again, I'm playing them all as endings, but you could use them for intros as well.
And the last one is the almighty classic - I wasn't going to include this, but I think it's so fun and everone should
learn how to do it, this is the.
. . .
Just because you need to know that one you know,
but it also works as a continuation if you leave off the last three notes, so if you go
. . .
And then you're off again, so it can actually work as a continuation lick as well,
or an intro lick, it doesn't have to be an ending, although the classic use of that lick is of course as an ending.
So let's get to a close-up now and run through these licks.
So here we go for lick 1 or intro/ending 1 we're starting with the third finger at the ninth fret,
and we're also putting the little finger down also in the ninth fret but on the thinnest string,
and you're going to pick third string, first string, third string, move it down one fret, do the same thing,
move it down one fret and do the same thing, so you get this
. . .
And we finish using a little bar with our first finger over the thinnest two strings,
second finger down on the sixth fret of the third string (strums).
. . .
Okay so here we go for lick number 2. This is a bit of a weird one some of you might find this a bit difficult.
Don't worry, it's just going to take practice. Second finger, fifth fret, fourth string. Third finger, fifth fret, second string.
Little finger underneath, fifth fret, thinnest string. Now the little finger is going to stay in the same place all the time.
You can play lots of different variations of this lick, so I'm just going to play each one once,
but you can play really lots of different rhythms. We start here with a pick (picks).
And we can move all of the fingers off except little finger, and put our first finger down as a bar (strums).
Then we move that bar back one fret (strums). And then back another fret (strums).
And again.
. . .
You can change the rhythm, you might go:
. . .
Or any of that sort of rhythm would work.
For those of you that haven't thought about it before: yes, you're going to have to use picking fingers here,
or finger style, you can't play that lick with a plectrum.
Okay, lick 3 is a pretty straight forward one, we've got this first finger at the fifth fret of the thinnest string.
That note is going to stay the same all the time, and the note on the second string is going to go from eigth fret,
seventh fret, sixth fret, and then we move the first finger over to create a little bar on the thinnest two strings.
You can either use your third finger like that, third finger, third finger, second finger and then the bar,
or four, three, two, bar - it doesn't really matter.
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or:
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Okay, here we are for lick 4.
Now lick 4 is this interesting contrary motion one where we have these notes here, starting on the second fret, going:
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And we also have these notes here starting at the fifth fret on the fourth string:
. . .
And we play them at the same time.
Now, there's lots of different fingering options for this.
The fingering that I prefer for myself most of the time is using first finger and third finger first:
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Sliding up with my first finger and putting my second finger down on the fourth string.
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Then swapping to first and third or first and fourth depending on what mood I'm in:
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Then sliding first finger back and fourth finger goes down on the second string:
. . .
So you end up with this:
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Okay, lick number 5 here. This is a classic kind of ending thing which is almost funny, but it's very kind of generic,
you should at least know this one.
We're starting here, third finger, fifth fret, first finger, third fret, step it back, step it back again.
Open E string, first finger, second fret, third finger fourth fret, and then slide third finger up to the fifth fret.
So:
. . .
Okay the last thing that we need to cover on this intros and ending,
I mentioned in the beginning is a thing called a side slide which is when you step to a chord from one fret below,
or one fret above. So, if we had an A7 chord (strums), we can step up to it (strums), or down to it (strums).
So if we took our first little intro lick that we had (plays), or we could step up to it (plays fowl), sorry, (plays).
And both them are functioning just as well as each other, it's just really stepping from above or from below.