Guitar MX Blog

Every month, Riff Interactive dumps a month’s worth of videos from their ‘Lick Of The Day’ feature to their YouTube channel. These short LOTD video lessons follow a monthly theme. Riff Interactive just posted last months lessons from a series called ‘British Blues Rock’.

Here’s an example from the video series. It’s an ascending pattern built on the E Minor Pentatonic Scale:

Be sure to read the comments in the About This Video section for some great information about each lick. Here’s the commentary for this above lick:

Today’s lick is a classic blues-rock phrase. This ascending serpentine melody makes use of a strong musical procedure known as a sequence. A sequence is the repetition of a pattern on different scale steps during the course of a line. The lick relies exclusively on the E Minor Pentatonic Scale (E-G-A-B-D) situated in the 12th position, and is played over a crushing D-to-E chord progression. In this example the repeated three-note pattern is a triplet figure which is moved incrementally in an ascending direction (D-B-D, E-D-E, G-E-G, etc.) toward a final dramatic high note, G. Variations of this sequence lick have appeared in virtually every rock guitar soloist’s style since the late 1960s, and is an immortal fixture of the guitar lexicon.

You can check out all the videos at the RiffIAGuitar YouTube channel.