How to Play Country Guitar

Transcript Hi, Boo Reiners here. I am a musician based out of New York City area. I started out as a kid playing the drums in grade school. Saw Ringo playing on TV with the Beatles, and figured nothing’s more fun than that, so I got to try that, and then eventually I found my …

Transcript Let’s take a look at the guitar style of Vince Gill for a second. He’s a fantastic singer but he also picks a mean guitar. He likes to play some, kind of, Baker’s Field style electric guitar. Maybe by way of East Tennessee. He also does some really great bluesy lead guitar stuff and …

Transcript Hank William’s guitar style was really straight ahead. He often played just rhythm guitar, and acoustic guitar with a plectrum. He had such a clear approach. It was really there to support the poetry of his lyrics but like a lot of other people, he was influenced by Jimmy Rogers. He didn’t do as …

Transcript Here’s some picking that comes from Luther Perkins who was in Johnny Cash’s band, The Tennessee Two. Cut so many incredible recordings at the Sun Studios. They had an extra tape machine there that was used for echo. You can get a little echo or delay pedal for your guitar. If you can hear …

Transcript Johnny Cash. He’s one of our favorite artists of all time. He played acoustic guitar in front of the Tennessee Two or the Tennessee Three, and he had a really cool style that was pretty bad ass. He would play the acoustic guitar with a flat pick. And he’d often have it down low …

Transcript There’s a style of guitar playing that I really love. Chet Atkins played all sorts of cool things with his guitar, off an electric guitar. Really influenced by Merle Travis but he also did something that I use a lot. He played double stops in thirds or in sixes and he would often provide …

Transcript Alright. Doc Watson, a national treasure musically and otherwise. He played all kind of styles. Played several different instruments. Was blind since he was a boy and comes from North Carolina. He had a flat picking style on the acoustic guitar that is still influencing player’s to this day and will continue on into …

Transcript Alright. Travis picking. Merle Travis. He was a guitar picker, a singer, a song writer, an entertainer, and he influenced just thousands and thousands of guitar pickers all over the world. He had a style that used a thumb pick and a finger pick. And I like to use kind of a heavy thumb …

Transcript Mother Maybell Carter of the Carter family was probably one of the most influential guitar players in all of country music. She used a thumb pick and a finger pick on her index finger. It had a way of strumming the rhythm and picking out some melody cause she was the sole guitar player …

Transcript Jimmy Rogers, the father of country music, he had a lot of Jazz in his playing. The way he played guitar was almost like a ragtime piano player. A lot of people don’t know way back then, but it’s punctuated with a lot of bass runs. So it’s got a real, bouncy lope to …

Transcript I’m going to talk to you about some effects that we can use when we’re playing country music on guitar, and that would probably begin with the reverb on your amp. Here’s the sound of the amp without any reverb. Let’s add some reverb to that. And then the next sort of most essential …

Transcript Okay, let’s talk about comping electric guitar in country. There’s some pretty basic ways you can go. Here’s one way to play an A chord. I like to use a flat pick and my middle finger and often my third finger. So that gives me a little more control. If I approach this like …

Transcript Let’s talk about chord comping in country guitar. For acoustic guitar, it might just be something like this. So that’s nice and straight ahead, sounds nice and full. Here’s another way of doing that. We could use our reduced chord fingering. Sp that’s used in those basic swing chords that we’ve talked about in …

Transcript Here’s a way to use the B-Bender to get a pedal steel lick going on your guitar. So I’m going to start right here, and I’m just climbing up the scale. So I’m bending this note with the B-Bender. Okay, so and then I’ll play the note above it. And I’ve got this D …

Transcript I’m going to show you a few bends that you can do with a string pull device, otherwise known as a B bender. And what happens is I push down on the neck and there’s a lever that the strap is attached to, which activates a mechanism here under the second string and it …

Transcript Let’s take a look at how we can create some pedal-steel like licks on the electric guitar. We know we’ve got some easy bends that we can do. Now if we add some lines, add some little melodic lines to lead up to that something like this would work. So that’s just kind of …

Transcript Let’s talk about doing some bends on the guitar to mimic the sound of the pedal steel guitar. The pedal steel guitar has a lot of machinery going on underneath it, pedals and levers, cables, rods. It’s kind of easier to do it on a pedal steel guitar, but with the guitar, regular guitar, …

Transcript When we play a solo on a country tune using electric guitar, there’s going to be some times we’re bending a note that’s going to be really expressive, really effective. So bending strings on your guitar is something you want to get really accustomed to. And it’s almost like you’re going to try to …

Transcript Let’s take a look at playing some boogie-woogie patterns on the guitar. If you’re in the key of E, here’s an E chord. I could play the bottom part of the E chord just by barring with my first finger the fifth and fourth string. So if I did that and then I placed …

Transcript Twelve bar blues in country music is something that Hank Williams was especially prolific at and did better than anybody. It’s really just twelve measures. You’ve got sometimes just four measure of the one chord if we’re in the key of E. We’re going to use E, A, B7. We might want to use …

Transcript One style of playing electric guitar in country music involves chicken picking and it kind of sounds like a chicken in the barnyard I guess. Don Rich of Buck Owens and the Buckaroos was one of my favorite chicken pickers. He had a lick that went something like this, and it’s just using the …

Transcript So here’s a way to go about playing a solo in a country ballad, and I’ll use different techniques that I like to use, hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, double-stops, sixes. Obviously you could do several different things. I find that just going for the melody tends to be a sure fire way to get the …

Transcript So movable chord shapes in country guitar are shapes that you can just move anywhere up and down the fingerboard, there are no open strings. If we play the cowboy chords as we called them before, there’s a lot of open notes, a lot of unfrated notes that sound grate. But sometimes, you might …

Transcript So getting back to what the fiddle does. The fiddle gives us all sorts of ideas when we’re playing country guitar, and one thing the fiddle does really well is it can play a melody on one string and next to that string would be another open string that can be used as a …

Transcript So when we’re playing a melody, we want to, sometimes, dress it up a little bit, and adding grace notes is a way to do that. A grace note is just a very small little passing tone, perhaps, might be a little rhythmic addition to what you’re playing melodically. So in the key of …

Transcript So let’s check out using the interval of a sixth in the same way that we use thirds as double-stops. Here in a C chord, if you take the notes that are under your first and second finger, you’ve got an E and a C, that’s a sixth. That’s the interval known as a …

Transcript Double-stops are where we play two strings often side by side, neighboring strings, and we play them up and down a scale in a melody, and it fills out the sound quite nicely. That’s a little melodic fragment from an instrumental tune. Here I’m going to do the same thing using the third and …

Transcript So manual vibrato, as opposed to electronic vibrato, is something that takes a little bit of practice. It’s done more on electric guitar than on acoustic guitar, but it might sound something like this. So that’s just me yanking on that string. And it’s used in blues probably more than it’s used in country, …

Transcript So here’s a bottle neck slide, there are all kinds of different slides out there. Some are made from a piece of pipe. Some might be made from a ceramic material. This glass slide is really versatile for acoustic playing and electric playing. Some guys might have taken a wine bottle and chopped the …

Transcript Let’s take a look at the blues pentatonic scale and how it fits into country music. You might have heard it in some of the old mountain ballads. You might have heard it in some bluesy Hank Williams style songs. Again, it’s that five note scale, so if we were in the key of …

Transcript Playing minor scales in country guitar is a lot of fun. It can be used for a sad song. In the key of C, we have the scale degrees, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one. And that’s a formula. And we’ve got whole steps, half steps. We’ve got two half steps. The …

Transcript Minor pentatonic scales for country guitar can be really cool. There’s some old mountain music, old ballads that use very modal sounding scales. Some of them are minor pentatonic. So let’s take a listen to something in E minor. E minor is the relative minor of G major. So we looked at G major’s …

Transcript All right, we’re going to go over a major scale. Let’s start with the key of C. The C chord has a major scale within it that is very accessible. So if you start with the C note on the fifth string, third fret, go from there to the D note on the fourth …

Transcript Pentatonic scales in country music can lend the melody a certain sweet quality. In the key of G, we could take the two octaves of the G major scale and gap those scales. In other words, we’ll take a few notes out. Instead of having seven notes, we’re going to have five notes. That’s …

Transcript Melodies are made up of intervals. Intervals are, simply, just a space just from one note to the next. A scale, like the C Major scale, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. If you think of it as a ruler that can measure spaces from one note to the next, that tells …

Transcript Let’s talk about sliding notes on the guitar. The fiddle, as you know, does all kinds of sliding around. There are no frets on the fingerboard of the fiddle. We’re always trying to copy what the fiddle does, melodically, in country music, especially the instrumental side of things. The fiddle is really great at …

Transcript We talked earlier about hammer-ons which is where we play a note and we place a finger on top of the ringing note. Here’s the opposite of that. We call it a pull-off, and basically we’re kind of rolling off of a fretted note. So, say I was playing a C chord and I …

Transcript I’m going to show you how to use hammer-ons to play some melody. Here’s a simple hammer-on on the fourth string. So I’m going to pick the fourth string and I’m going to put my middle finger down while the string is ringing. So this is kind of a basic technique, but used with …

Transcript Okay, hybrid picking is where we use the flat pick that we’re holding with the thumb and the index finger and then we’ve got the middle finger to add some other melody notes, chord tones, rhythmic syncopation. You could even use the ring fingers as well. Some people might even throw in the fourth …

Transcript All right in a lot of country music you’ve got a finger picking technique that you might want to use depending on the song. There are some players that go with the Merle Travis style where you’ve got the thumb and the index finger. You might be using a thumb pick. You might be …

Transcript Okay, flat picking style guitar playing usually refers to playing melody with a flat pick usually on an acoustic guitar. And you might’ve heard some guys like Doc Watson, Clarence White playing fiddle tunes using a flat pick and a down-up down-up motion. So that’s been a really influential style for guitar players in …

Transcript All right in country music we like to use different techniques for driving a set of chords, the song what have you. There’s a term that gets thrown around a lot. The boom chick or boom chicka rhythm. And it’s really I’m just picking the root note on a bass string and I’m strumming. …

Transcript Playing country music on guitar involves a lot of open chords, meaning we’re using chord shapes that have a lot of open, unfretted notes. Some people might call those “cowboy chords”. They are some of the most basic chords, but they sound really good on acoustic guitar because they have a lot of sustain …

Transcript All right. We’re going to take a look at the capo and how to use in on the guitar, especially in country music. This is a capo that I use. There’s all different types out there. Some are just a clamp style that you just grip. Squeeze it, put it into place, and let …

Transcript This is a flat pick or a plectrum, and we use it in all kinds of styles of guitar playing, and especially in country music. We’re playing country guitar and we want to get a nice rhythm going with this thing, so here’s kind of the most basic rhythm you might do. So that …

Transcript Electric guitar versus acoustic guitar in country music, I think acoustic guitar is the backbone of any country song. It’s the glue. It’s something that you might not hear under a noisy string band or even a honky-tonk dancehall band, but it’s got to be there to glue all the other rhythms together that …

Transcript Country guitar is a really special part of the guitar world, in my opinion. It’s part of the bard’s toolkit. I think of great country music as almost like a newscast from some vagabond who’s been drifting around the country and observing and making account of what’s going on around him. That’s kind of …