A Guitarist’s Guide to Lick Creation
Guitar licks are a great way to improve your technique, gather inspiration and get to know new musical styles. But a guitar lick is practically impossible to apply.
Let’s assume we have a rock lick and would like to use it spontaneously in a band rehearsal while improvising.
Does the key fit? The tempo? Does it fit the style?
Lick Fragments
One of many solutions is: Lick Fragments! But what exactly are Lick Fragments?
With Lick Fragments we don’t learn a whole lick, but only a small — movable — part. Key, tempo and style can be individually adjusted and the above problem questions can be avoided.
Example
This video actually consists of Lick Fragments. Even if it looks like everything is “reinvented” again and again at the beginning, it is actually a sequence of Lick Fragments.
Timestamp: 0:26
This “lick” could now be seen as a whole and try to squeeze in somewhere, or you can see it as several small individual — exactly the same — lick fragments.
Here you can clearly see that two notes are played on the highest string, then on the next lower string and then on another string lower. The only thing I had to do now is to adjust the whole thing to the scale so that it doesn’t sound somehow off or something (unless you want it to sound off, of course).
So for my right as well as for my left hand this small fragment is nothing new. So I don’t have to practice it for another 10 hours until it works, I already know it. Nevertheless, it always sounds different when I play it in a different scale, different strings or a different context.
Timestamp: 0:28
Here again the same. Actually, it could just be a long lick. But due to the tempo, it will probably be almost impossible to squeeze this lick 1:1 into another song somewhere. By the way, it’s 32nd notes!
So here, too, it’s actually just a repetition. Again, it remains almost the same for my right and left hand, and I only had to practice the small fragment. After the first 12 notes, my hands almost knew what to do! 🙂
So try not to practice whole licks, but rather to learn small parts of cool licks and incorporate them as often as possible in different places, from different songs, with different tempos and keys.
