Elegant, short, effective, but certainly not simple. These two licks will certainly help you in general playing if you’ve never tried them before.
These are in my opinion the basic two licks introduced by Paul Gilbert that will really help anyone make progress.
So let’s get straight to them.
The first one is mentioned in this video of a Paul Gilbert Lesson at around 2 minutes. If possible also listen to his advice on alternate picking.
The diagrammatic representation of that lick is given here:
The downward arrows represent downstrokes, and the other symbol represents upstrokes.
It can also be played anywhere on a scale, Eg:
The highlighted part is the actual lick. I wrote it twice simply to show that:
- The lick can be repeated basically ad infinitum
- It is entirely alternate picking. (down, up, down, up…….)
This is useful for two purposes. Firstly, it helps to synchronise left and right hand action up to high speeds.
Secondly, it scales very well. You can perform it really slow to start with and slowly increase the speed to as fast as you can. That is certainly no easy task once you reach speeds in excess of 180 beats per minute. Hence, it can be a challenge for players of any level. No wonder why Paul still sticks with it!
The second lick is a classic outside picking lick, again by Paul Gilbert, and is detailed quite well in this video. However, I do want to add some comments.
It looks like this:
Why this lick is really good, is firstly, when we start doing it, you realise that you need plenty of finger flexibility to accurately and cleanly perform the skipping like action over the strings on the first 4 notes.
Secondly, you need quite a bit of left hand stamina to continually do this lick at higher speeds due to the large hops + hammer-on’s and pull-off’s. Thus this lick does build quite a bit of stamina.
And that’s it, straightforward but certainly not easy. These basic licks can be used to great effect by anyone from absolute novice to professional. So in your spare time, fall back on some of the basics like these two and play around with them for a couple of minutes. I think that it will benefit you greatly in playing.
So give it try and let me know what you think.
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