In this guitar lesson, we’re going to look at another dorian mode guitar lick. Like the lick from the last lesson, the one we’ll look at now is composed from notes of the A Dorian mode, and uses quite a lot of sweep picking technique. Although, I must admit that I couldn’t resist throwing in copious amounts of legato technique into the mix as well. 🙂
So grab your guitar and metronome, and we can get started by checking out the lick…
Rock Guitar Lick 30: Dorian Sweep Picking Lick 2
As you can see, the first bar of lick uses a lot of legato technique, as well as a couple of sneaky two string sweeps. After the first four notes have been dealt with, you’ll then need to play a six note melodic pattern that is repeated twice.
Once all this legato madness has been negotiated, the lick finishes with two sweep picked arpeggios. The first one is a descending C Major 7 arpeggio, which is constructed from these notes…
After you play the C Major 7 arpeggio, you’ll then need to play a descending A Minor 7 arpeggio, that’s made up of the following notes…
To help you clearly see what I’ve just talked about, here’s the lick again with some written notes added to it…
If you follow all the picking and fingering suggestions that I’ve included, then this lick shouldn’t be too hard to learn. But be sure that you pay close attention to the sixteenth note timing that the entire lick uses. It’s very easy to get overly-enthusiastic and rush the legato parts of the lick. So it’s important that, when you start playing the lick to a metronome, you make all the sixteenth notes as even as humanly possible.
Have fun!
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