Five Blues Guitar Licks All Guitarists Should Know

I'm a firm believer that a good guitarist should have a large vocabulary of guitar licks up their sleeves. Jazz guitar giant Pat Metheny once said that only 30% of his improvisation is improvised, the rest are licks that he had worked out previously.

In my opinion, the blues is the best place to start practising guitar soloing, so developing an arsenal of blues licks is essential. Therefore, I would like to share with you, five blues guitar licks that I think all guitarists should know.

All of the following licks are in the key of A and can be played over an A blues chord progression or a static A7 chord. The scale used is the A minor pentatonic scale, as shown below.

The minor pentatonic scale is the most basic scale which can be used to play the blues. The following guitar lick is a must-know for all blues guitarists which incorporates a health dose of bending.

The second lick is tricky because only one note is played per string. But don't worry, you will nail it in no time. The good thing about this lick is that it's also one of the less cliched licks that guitarists play.

This is one the more familiar sounding licks which is nevertheless useful to use when you're playing the blues. This lick can be heard in Led Zeppelin's song, Black Dog.

At certain times in a blues guitar solo, you may want to break out into a blues run, which is essentially a fast-paced lick that runs either up or down the pentatonic scale. The speed at which this is played makes this tricky but once again with good practice this should be easy in no time. Be careful not to abuse blues runs - whilst it sounds impressive when used sparsely, overusing can make the guitar solo boring!

Bending and releasing the 3rd note by a half-step of the minor pentatonics scale can give you a very sexy blues sound as the following blues lick demonstrates. The same note can also be bent to a whole-step too - the key is to experiment with the scale and develop your own variations of these licks.

For more free blues guitar licks and guitar lessons, visit my frequently-updated blog at http://www.shadowguitarist.co.uk.