50 Indispensable Pentatonic Licks!
Let’s start with a question: What makes a guitar solo memorable? Of course there’s no single answer, but the one I’m thinking of is ‘the lick that jumps out and makes you think... Wow! Now that was nice.’ I’m talking about that elusive set of notes that gives a musical, structured, catchy, sometimes flashy, feel to a solo, and which can instantly identify a player (BB King’s ‘high root-note stab with slide’, for example). So, just think of a lick as a succinct sentence, the perfect few words with which to convey your meaning.
Learning licks is actually a great way to increase your musical vocabulary. It gives you ready-made musical sentences that may be ideal for your purposes, while also benefitting your playing by improving abilities in musical, technical and stylistic aspects. Licks can also act as a platform to introduce new ideas into your playing, by setting you challenges you might otherwise never have imagined.
Another, perhaps counter-intuitive, point of having a great lick vocabulary, is what it can bring to your improvisational skills. Although you night naturally think of licks-based improvisation as pretty ‘non spontaneous’ (a musical ‘painting by numbers’ if you will), learning licks helps to improve phrasing and gives you an instinctive feel for what ‘sounds right’. And when you’ve learned enough of them, you’ll have absorbed the musicality and technical prowess to naturally deliver their influence and phrasing - without replaying them note-for-note every time. The combination of this and true spontaneity can help you to sound very slick and professional, and also identify you as a player. Anyway, let’s face it, learning new licks is great fun!
For this feature, I’ve put together a mammoth lick collection in an eclectic range of styles for your delectation. They’re presented in no particular order of difficulty, but are grouped stylistically, in a variety of keys and just
