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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 way to the Banjo, five string Banjo, and bluegrass music, and that got an appetite going for all kinds of string instruments.

So gotten to work in all fields of music, all different genres, and I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of people from all over the musical map, my own band, Demolition String Band. We’ve been together for quite awhile, making albums every few years. Recently got a chance to work with Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. Been working pretty steadily the past few years with a band called Dispatch, bringing my country flavor to their indie rock sound, and also had a real privilege to work with the late, great Charlie Louvin of the Louvin Brothers here in New York City. And also got to bring my, sort of, Americana country flavor to a band from New York here called the Klezmatics World Music Klezmer Band, who won a Grammy award back in 2007.

And on the side I like to teach. I’ve been teaching as long as I can remember, and I guess it’s just a way that I can share music more intimately instead of from a stage, which is of course fantastic. But I love sitting down one on one with folks that are curious about music, how it works. Even people that have been at it for many years and want to get better, it’s a lot of fun for me, and I’ve had great teachers over the years, since I started out as a little kid. And it’s a way that I can share with other people, that’s a lot of fun and very rewarding.

So please keep in touch with me on my website, www.demolitionstringband.com, and if you want to learn more about where I’m playing, or where I’m teaching, that’s a good place to go.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this Howcast series on playing country guitar. I hope I’ve given you some nuts and bolts that you can put to use, and move you further up the road in your love of country music and playing guitar.

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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 that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about.

His guitar leads tend to be just like his singing. Just very emotional, very lyrical. And he kind of reminds us that country and blues are still cousins from the same family. So you might hear him do something like this.

So it might not be the flashiest thing to do, but it’s the most melodic, most vocal like. Kind of reminds me sometimes of what BB King might play when he’s not singing. That conversation between BB and his guitar, Lucille. I would imagine Vince, just like the rest of us, has to check in with Lucille regularly for inspiration.

But Vince also does a lot of really hot country style picking. That’s got a lot of pull offs in it. He also does some really cool descending lines. Stuff like this. Some of those pull offs, they’re kind of grace notes. I find I get some of that from listening to Blue Grass stuff like Clarence White, obviously Doc Watson, some Tony Rice. It’s a cool way to just dress up a real simple melodic line. And it adds a nice momentum to the rhythm that you’re trying to get out, something like…

So I’m just going down, sort of a bluesy pentatonic scale like… and I’m doing that pull off on my way down to the root. And, of course, doing whole step pull offs works really well too. Half step pull offs.

So anyway, that’s just a little taste of some of my favorite Vince Gill stuff that he likes to do and he’s got a whole lot more where that came from.

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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 many of the fancy little runs and stuff. One thing that he was really great at, was taking the blues and making it really country.

His tunes, maybe in E or in A, just had that real bluesy drive. Before there was a distinction between blues and country, way back in the day, you might hear him do something like this.

Maybe, if he wanted to play in the key of A.

That covers a lot of ground. That’s a drive in country beat, but it’s also got that bluesy quality as a 12-bar song form. I think the deeper you go into the Hank Williams discography, you’re going to hear a lot more blues in his song writing, some of his melody, and his singing. Of course, he’s got so many different facets to his song writing, and his style of song writing, types of core progressions and whatnot.

Check him out. There’s actually a collection of him doing demos, his vocal and guitar. You can find out there. That would be really illuminating for you, as well. He’s a really solid guitar player.

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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 me just hitting those strings muted you can hear a slap back echo there. That echo adds an extra note really to the rhythm.

And you want to set your tempo that you’re playing at to match the echo slap back or vice versa. I generally like to know what the tempo of the song’s going to be and then I’ll set the echo to match the tempo of the song that I’m in so that it gives me the right syncopation.

Right now I’ve got the pick-up selection set in the middle. I can go back to the bridge pick-up, and I’m muting by the saddles once again, and that just gives it a real solid momentum and you’re not really missing that there’s no drummer. But, I’ll still play this type of rhythm even when there’s a drummer that I might be playing along with.

So all that just real, simple, triadic chord work down on the low strings is what gives you that great Johnny Cash Tennessee Two sound. Add a little bit of echo that’s set at the right time so you get that nice syncopated rhythm, and do some muting back here. You might even want to experiment with some flat wound strings on your Telecaster, give you that nice thumpy Luther Perkins sound.

Anyway, thanks for listening.

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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 like this. Sometimes he’d be strumming way up here and then he’d move back here and then he’d move back up here. So that’s what you’d see him to live a lot and it’s really cool showmanship and it gets the job done in terms of putting the song across.

The Sun Studio sessions that were so groundbreaking with the Tennessee Two had something a little different going on. He would take a card and weave it into the strings like this, okay like that, and then he would kind of use it as a percussion instrument because they didn’t have a drummer. They had doghouse bass slapping away. Luther Perkins picking on the Telecaster.

There was an echo machine, an extra tape machine in the studio that was used for echo, and it was often producing its own sort of rhythmic back beat. So with Johnny hitting on his guitar like that, this kind of acted like the snares that would be hitting against the underside of a snare drum. Some people would call this style of guitar playing sock guitar. You can do the same thing without a card, or you can make some chords, but the focus is on the texture of the pick going across the strings but having that card in there gives it an extra sizzle.

So check it out, play along with your favorite Johnny Cash recordings and see if you don’t get a little extra rhythm.

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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 a really nice counterpoint to what the singer was doing melodically. Maybe he’d add a nice little turnaround.

So he would often grab maybe two strings next to one another or he might grab the forth and second string, working on the sixth sequence. And it’s just a really cool way. You’ve got a clean setting with your amp, your electric guitar. You want to do something that’s got some finesse, that’s sensitive to what the singer’s doing vocally and lyric wise. So these little moves that he did.

Often he’d be just spelling out parts of a chord. So here I am on a D7 chord and if I might want to go across down into the lower regions of that chord, the lower voicings. So a lot of it is really sussing out your chords up and down the neck and then reducing the chords to little triads.

So going back to the scale work that we had talked about earlier, you’re playing your basic major scale and then you’re adding notes in a sequential pattern. So, say instead of climbing G, A, B, C, D, what if I climbed up in double stops? Or I could go up in sixths, like this.

So that takes a lot of practice. You have to put some time in just discovering, again, where the right notes are, where the wrong notes are, the shapes. There’s not a lot of shapes you have to remember; it’s a lot of shapes that just get repeated but it’s the sequence of the shapes that you want to start trying to memorize.

All this memorization really doesn’t take musical talent. Everybody memorizes stuff. We all memorize stuff. So try to keep that in mind that you’re just memorizing something, you’re not relying necessarily on a deep well of musical talent necessarily, although it doesn’t hurt. Just trying to memorize some of these moves will make it that much easier to call up on it when it’s time to play a solo in a song or play some fills, play something that’s sympathetic to what the singer’s doing.

So that’s just kind of one part of Chet Atkins’ style of playing but it’s a part that I find really useful and I really love it and I think it sounds really good, especially on electric guitar. So, good luck with that and we’ll see you back here soon.

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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 the decades and centuries.

Anyway, here’s something that you might have heard Doc Watson play. This is his style of picking. And he played all sorts of songs, gospel, old mountain tunes, ballads. He played fiddle tunes on the guitar. He started out playing, believe it or not, a Les Paul electric guitar at a square dance when they didn’t have a fiddle player. And he can simulate the melodic power of a fiddle on a guitar using that down, up, down, up picking action.

And if you were playing a fiddle you would be bowing up and down, up and down. Kind of on the same parts of the measure. One and two and three and four. And one and two and three and four. And one and two and three and four. And one and two and three, four. And one and two and three and four. And one, two, three. Okay?

So you’ve got that down, up, down, up action that really gives the melody a lot of momentum and a lot of rhythmic power. And then he might throwing in some other licks just to to make it a little flashy. And those are kind of some of the stuff that he might have picked up from listening to Jimmy Rodgers.

But of course playing it a bit faster. So he might play something like. So that might be something that the fiddle player would play, but he, you know, was inventive enough where he could just get those melodies and rhythms going with his flat pick on an electric guitar that could be heard over the people dancing and hooping and hollering, having a good time.

So Doc could really fire up a crowd with not just his inventive flashy licks but also playing stuff really fast. So make sure you put a lot of time into checking out Doc Watson’s music. He’s pretty amazing.

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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 pick that will stay on my thumb and not shift around. You just kind of have to experiment to find the right thumb pick and finger pick that feels right on your fingers. Anyway, he used a lot of movable chord shapes and this would be kind of a typical groove that he might pick on the guitar.

And the thing you kind of want to pay attention to is that thumb. Now, he had a guitar with a very thin neck and he could wrap his thumb around not only the sixth string but the fifth string as well. I don’t play a guitar that’s got a neck quite that thin, but I can still get that sound. I’ve also got a little bit of muting going on with the heel of my hand, so when you’re starting out with this style you want to get that thumb action going. So I’m going one, two three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. So whenever you come around to beat one you want to have that low root that I’ve got on the sixth string at the third fret, and I’m holding it with my thumb.

Now you could still get this sound using fingering the chords in the more traditional grip, but I think you’re going to find that using his style of fingering the chords just kind of gets you a little closer into his zone. So the index finger adds the syncopation and it doesn’t take a lot of notes. It sounds like there’s more going on than there actually is.

He’s got a bunch of tunes that he recorded under his own pen and I would definitely recommend you check out his solo recordings so you can really hear what he’s doing. He’s got some songs that maybe started out as traditional but he adopted them with his own verses, lyrics, and titles and was really an incredible song writer. Nine Pound Hammer, Dark as a Dungeon. And then he would play standards too like nobody else.

So check out Merle Travis for a more in depth survey into his sound and just keep that thumb going. You can’t practice that thumb too much. And have fun with it.

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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 in their trio.

And I’m going to try to show you some basic things you can do to try to get that going on. So holding down a G chord I’m going to hit the G note on the sixth string and then I’m going to strum up with my index finger that has the pick on it. So I’ve got a bass note and a chord sound. Some people might anchor a free finger on the top. Or you might just have your hand free floating. Whatever is most comfortable for you is the right way to do it.

So I might use some of that root fifth bass note motion here. Okay so to add to that I might pick out some melody, something like this. So this was a way that she could play and drive her trio and have a lot of sound, a lot of volume. Often those guys would be playing where there was no electricity. No amplification so she’d have a big old hollow body acoustic Gibson guitar. And with a thumb pick and a finger pick she could get a lot of sound and a lot of rhythm and drive out of her playing.

A lot of people don’t play that way anymore but it’s a fun way to play those old songs and I think you should give it a try.

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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 it. And if he was playing out of a key of C, out of a C shape, he might play something like this.

So to get all those strung together, you kind of have to sit down and experiment with basic chord shapes, the scale of that chord, connecting the scales to the other chords that belong in that key. So we’ve got a F chord. We’ve got a G chord. Going from a G back to a C. We’re just climbing up the scale. G, A, B, C. And then we’re going to go back down.

And he would swing those lines a little bit. Throwing in little flourishes like that, that might extend the chord from a basic triad to a seventh chord. … And so those are some ideas to get you started on playing guitar like the singing break man, Jimmy Rogers.

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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 effect would probably be tremolo. The tremolo on the amp can sometimes sound really good, so just turn the reverb down so we can just hear the tremolo. So that sounds really cool. It’s really good for a slow song.

The other effect that you might find really handy is using some echo. So you might get any digital delay pedal, echo pedal. There’s all kinds of there that you can get for pretty cheap, and it really depends on how much echo you want to hear in the mix. So every echo box is going to have some kind of a mix adjustment. It’s also going to have the amount of echoes that you hear and it’s also going to have the time that will go by before the echo is heard. So I’m going to turn the tremolo back down. Here’s some echo. So that’s what we call a slap back.

I can make it a little more dramatic by adjusting the timing and the amount of echoes that we hear. So with the echo box, echo effect stomp box, whatever you want to be using, you’re going to set the timing for a certain rhythm. So if I was going to be in a rhythm that was one, two. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. I could set my echo to fit that rhythm or fit the tempo, I should say. Sp you can hear those trails after you’ve hit the note and even stopped the note. So that can add some cool dimension to your playing. It can add some rhythm actually to whatever part you’re playing.

So obviously, there are a bunch of other effects that you could use playing country music with your guitar, but these are three that I don’t think you’re going to get too far without: reverb, tremolo, and echo. So check those out.

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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 I would an acoustic guitar, it would be more like this, and that can be great. That might be perfectly appropriate, but sometimes I like to run the amp a little loud and then pull back on the volume by how hard I’m digging in or maybe using my fingers more than the bare pick.

So that rhythm there is kind of the same thing as this on an acoustic guitar but it’s tucked in more. It’s underneath the vocal more so it’s got a lot of rhythm. Anybody else that you’re playing with can really tell what you’re doing, but it supports the singing as it should. So I could go up the neck for something a little bluesier. I could go up here if I wanted a jazzier sound and I’m kind of doing a little bit of muting up here by the saddles. I could do something that’s got even more activity going on, something like. That’s that got kind of some of that boogie-woogie sort of pattern to it. And again, I’m playing a string with a pick and letting it ring. And then I might play something above there with the middle and ring finger.

So these are just a couple different approaches you can use for comping rhythm in a country tune on your electric guitar.

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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 another video where we were trying to go for some movable forms. We’re not relying on any open strings for our chord sound. We’re going for fingerings that can be moved up and down the neck regardless of the key that we’re in. These are especially handy because if you’re starting out in the key of G and then it’s time to go up a half step, you’ve got these movable forms at your fingertips.

There’s kind of a swing element to things style of chord playing in country music. You might be playing something totally different on electric guitar. There might be a little more rock where you want to have more of a power chord sort of sound. The varieties are pretty limitless. There’s another way that you can thinking of comping for a country tune. Say we’re in the key of A. I could use this kind of boogie-woogie sort of pattern where I’m really focusing on those bass strings and just getting that kind of rock and roll boogie thing. So a lot of country music has that in there.

Just start paying attention when you’re listening to your favorite music, to your favorite artist. Try to dig in a little deeper in your listening and listen to the backing tracks a little more and you’ll start to get more of a concept on how this stuff works. It’s really supportive playing. You could also check out Creedence Clearwater Revival. John Fogerty is just a rhythm machine on the guitar and so many of us are still copying what he did.

So yeah. So those are some tips that will get you started on your different styles of comping for country guitar.

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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 triad that forms when I activate the B-Bender.

And I’ll add a little line underneath it, kind of something like this. And I could do the same thing on a G chord, that was on a D chord. Here, if I move up to a G chord, I can play the same thing. And there I started with the upper note, I’m already activating the B-Bender, now I’m going to release it. And that’s how you can play a pedal steel lick on the guitar using your B-Bender.

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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 raises it a whole step. Kind of like what a pedal steel guitar would do on one of its strings.

So here’s a real simple way to get the pedal steel sound activating this string pull device. So I’m going to play the 5th string which is an A. And then I’m gonna play the second string which is a B. And then I’ll play the 1st string which is an E. So that’s a nice chord, but what I want to do is I want to bend into an A major triad. So I’ve got A. And then I’ll end up with a C sharp on the 2nd string. And then the 5th degree on the 1st string, an E note. So I’m gonna play those 3 notes together. And then I’ll push down on the neck like this.

So I could play a full A chord here. I play it like this. Some people play A like this. Some people might bar it here. And if I’d pushed down on the B bender I’m going to get this sound. So that’s not the sound we want generally. There might be a song somewhere where that fits just right.

So we want to take this note that is normally fretted on the 2nd string at the 2nd fret. We want to take that note and push it back a whole step so that when we push down on the string bender we get that note from the string bender’s action. So it’s going to go like this.

I can get that same sound from a different chord instead of playing a C bar chord like this. Again, I want to drop that note that’s on the 2nd string 5th fret. I want to drop it down to the 3rd fret. So there’s my C suspended chord. And I’m going to get rid of that suspension using the B bender and I’m going to bend into a C major triad like this. Okay?

So that’s just one of the most basic shapes that you can use when you first try to use a B bender. Is that basic A shape, drop in the note on the 2nd string down a whole step, letting the B bender put that note in when you bend it.

And that’s how you use a B bender guitar.

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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 a, sort of, improvised string of bends that I like to use, a few lines from the E Major scale to sort of connect them all. Hopefully we can do this while incorporating the melody of the tune. So here’s a simple melody we could use.

So again, we’ve got bends that we do in different positions. And, then we can try to connect them with parts of the scale, the key that we’re in, that would hint at the melody that we’re hopefully hugging with our improvisation. And I find that just going for the melody, even if I don’t get all of the melody, just going for it, tends to keep me on the rails and keeps it listenable. Keeps it out of a flashy display of licks but rather gives it a target to aim for.

So hopefully that’ll help you get some pedal-steel licks going on your six string electric guitar.

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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, we’re going have to do it manually. Of course, we don’t have to lug around quite so much stuff.

Anyway, here’s a real common bend that we do. I’ve got the top two strings of a basic A major bar chord here, okay? But I’m going to reduce this cord to just the top two strings, and I’m going to fret it with the pinky, okay? Then on the third string, I’m going to put my second scale degree note, which is a B, because I want to bend that note into this triad here. That A major triad is what I’m going to end up with after doing my manual bend, okay?

So here I’ve got the top two notes of the triad, here’s the suspension, the suspended note of the triad and I’m going to bend into just the basic major triad by doing this. And I’ve got a helper finger behind the finger I’m using to fret the note on the third string. And I might want to do that backwards. I could start out with the bend already in place, and then bend back up. I might even be able to let the root note on the fifth string ring out. But sometimes you’d end up bending so far up that you touch a ringing open string, so I might be able to get away with it easier moving up to the E major position here. Again, I’m using that hybrid picking, the flat pick and my middle and sometimes my ring finger. You also might want to go to just the rear pick up for a little bit more twang.

And that’s how you can get some pedal steel sounds on your regular old six string electric guitar.

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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 be a machine. At least you want to have that sort of accuracy.

Here’s a bend that I might do on the third string, fretting it at the second fret. And what I want to do is I want to bend up to a B note and have it be perfectly in tune and I’m going to have a helper finger behind the second finger that I’m using to fret the note. Okay? How about on an A chord? Here I’ve got two fingers behind the fretting finger to help it along. I can pull down on that string or I can push up. Whatever works for the moment that I’m doing it is what I’m going to do.

Here’s another way to kind of make it even fuller sounding. I could play another chord tone that might be on a nearby string that doesn’t have to be fretted, so in the case the first string is going to be the chord tone of E. So here I am. I’m going to play the root note. So I’m playing the root A, I’ve hit the fifth of the chord on the first string. Then I’m going to bend, go back to that third string, and I’m going to bend up from a B to a C-sharp.

And that’s just one way to kind of get into string bending on the guitar.

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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 this third finger on the fifth string fourth fret, I get that basic boogie-woogie pattern. I could also just double the bass line. The bass line might more accurately be doing something like.

On an A chord we could do the same thing. We just move over, move across one string each. On a D chord you could do a very similar thing like this. So I’m kind of swinging it right there. I could go a little straighter. Okay?

So that’s just an introduction to some of the boogie-woogie patterns that you might have heard on piano from long ago but they sound really good on a guitar, especially an electric guitar. So have some fun with that and we’ll see you soon.

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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 E7, A7 instead of just E triad and an A triad we could just use all seventh chords. And of course B7 is the five chord. So we’re going to go like this 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1. Okay so that was basically two bars for each chord except at the top we’ve got four bars of the E chord. At the end of the form you’ve got one bar of B7, one bar of A7 and then you’ve got two bars of E7 to finish the form. Some people might throw a B7 in for the last. Even the last two beats, they might sound something like this. Top again.

So that’s your basic twelve bar blues which you could use in any number of country standards and obviously the blues genre is full of twelve bar blues. So have fun with that and we’ll see you next time.

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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 sixes. You know, we might use those in all kind of styles of music. Blues, R and B, whatever.

What you can do to get that chicken picking sound is, you’re sort of muting with the heel of your hand. And so you’re resting the heel of the hand right on the saddles of the guitar. And if you ease back, you don’t have quite enough muting. If you ease too far forward, you’ve got more of a percussive sound which might be what you want. So you want to find where that special spot is that gives you the right amount of percussion as opposed to the actual pitch of the notes.

So the other thing is there’s a little approach in this particular lick. So I’m kind of getting more of a percussive sound approaching this grip, this double-stop grip. I’m approaching from below on the third string. Okay? And there’s some other places you can do this. There’s also some techniques where you can do something like this. Having a Telecaster with kind of low action and a light gauge of string is kind of what you’re going to need to have if you really want to get that real spanky chicken picking sound.

So also, your right hand picking, you might have a little less pick sticking out than normal. That can kind of go a ways towards getting that percussive picky sound. I’m also using the middle finger. This is also really important. So we’re hybrid picking here. So that gives us some of that rhythmic syncopation that we want. And I might use my ring finger along with my middle finger.

So anyway, that’s a little intro to chicken picking.

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 listener on board with what you’re doing, get them engaged.

I try not to play to guitar players. I try to play to the non-musicians, the civilians, and playing the melody is just a really sure fire way of getting them on board and it’s also a great way for me to hang my little licks and techniques onto something that’s recognizable. But I can put my own flavor in there so there’s that contrast that is easy for people to see and hear and feel.

So let’s take a melody that we all know down cold. We just know this in our sleep and it goes something like this. So I just tried to play the melody and straight as I could, but obviously adding little flavor and flourishes in there. Especially when I maybe got a little lost, that’s kind of where your style really comes through.

So those are some different approaches to dressing up the melody, just making it your own and you can take any country ballad and use any of those techniques and just make it your own musical statement.

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 be in a key were you need to do playing movable shapes that don’t have any open strings. So you’ve got some basic six string bar chords that you can use, or you can use just some on the notes. So here’s one that I like to use, it’s just the six string, the fifth string and the third string.

So I’m playing in A flat right now or a G sharp, I’m gonna go back to G, just for the sake of simplicity. The strings that I’m not really frating are getting muted by the grip that I’m using, so I’m pressing down again on strings three, five and six. Those fingers are gently touching the other strings that are not being frated, so that’s creating the damping or muting effect.

I’m gonna go from this G chord to the D chord and a lot of people might just go to this for a D chord, basic D bar chord, or I can, again, reduce that to just three strings, for I’m frating the sixth string, the fourth string and the third string. And it’s just a major triad because of where it’s voice in the guitar sounds nice and fat but mellow, so on those lower strings.

Basically this is just swing guitar 101 Freddy Green, Count Basie Orchestra. It’s often referred to as chord reduction where we’re taking a chord that could have six notes in it, six strings rather, we’re gonna reduce it to just three frated strings, for the rest of the strings like I say you get damped or muted.

We go to that D chord, we get easily turn that D chord in to the D seven chord, still just frating three strings. Suppose I needed to do a key change, that’s quite easy using this fingerings. OK, so that’s just one way of move chords around up an down the neck, you might try doing some chords that are on the upper strings, so I’m just using to top four strings here, there’s a G four, which is just the top part of this bar chord here.

Then when I go do D, I can use this fingering here, and this is a cool fingering because I can use all around, and there are scales within this chord grip also. And those are really handy if you wanna move from playing chord to playing some melody stuff, maybe a little turnaround. You can also add another note to that.

So that’s just a little introduction to movable chords forms on the guitar used in country music, you’re gonna definitely be spending a lot of time discovering all the other options and all the different keys and tonalities, and so good luck with that and will see you back here soon.

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 drone or it could be a fretted string, but the effect is something like this.

So I’m playing the melody on the second string while I’m hitting the third string which is just a G that’s just droning against everything I’m playing on the second string. I could do this same sort of effect, moved into the key of G. We could do a similar sort of droning against some melodic motion like we did in the key of C. Here I am on the fourth string which is the D note, and I’ve got the root on the third string.

So I’m kind of getting a little bit of a bagpipe sound, and believe it or not bagpipes figure into traditional country music quite prominently. The sound of a melody note against a droning note maybe below, sometimes above, sometimes that stationary note is called a pedal tone. You’ve heard it in other types of music where say, here’s an opening lick to a country standard. So that’s kind of got two notes droning. You’ve got the root on the third string, you’ve got the root an octave lower on the fourth string, and then you’ve got some melodic stuff going on the second string.

You also might hear something like this holding down a D chord. So there’s all different ways to use this technique, but the way I like to use it is often just in a real traditional way. Maybe I’m playing a fiddle tune. So all those slides and neighboring strings that are droning other chord tones can make the guitar just sound louder. You can just get a little more excitement going when you’re trying to place some melody, just adding in some different techniques to keep it interesting.

So that’s what the droning pedal tone can do for you.