Welcome back to the Rock Licks Booster course. It’s time to grab your guitar and devour a new guitar lick!
In this guitar lesson we’re going to take a look at a lick that moves through a few different minor pentatonic scale fingerings. So if you’re a rock guitarist that feels “locked in the box”, then you’ll probably find the lick a really helpful one to learn. 🙂 Let’s check out the lick now…
Rock Guitar Lick 15: Minor Pentatonic Position Shifting
I composed this lick using notes from the E Minor Pentatonic scale. And, as you can see, it makes use of four different minor pentatonic scale fingerings. Because you don’t stay in any one fingering for too long, it makes for a fantastic position shifting exercise. It also looks pretty cool when you get it up to speed. 🙂
If you’re already comfortable with the five two-note-per-string fingerings of the minor pentatonic scale, then it shouldn’t be too hard to learn and master this guitar lick. The main thing you need to look out for is the eight note picking pattern that repeats three times. It’s not obvious at first glance, so I thought I’d show you the TAB again with the pattern shown…
As you can see from the TAB, the pattern involves doing this…
- Playing the first note with a downstroke.
- Using a pull-off to articulate the second note.
- Alternate picking all the remaining notes.
Although the picking pattern is being moved to new string pairs as the lick progresses, it’s essentially the same thing played three times in a row. For this reason, I think it’s a good idea to learn the first eight notes of the lick first. Once you can play this small chunk fluently, then the rest of the lick will be much easier to learn.
That’s all for now. Hope you have fun with the lick!
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