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 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.
