30 Acoustic Americana Guitar Licks You MUST Know

Americana invokes guitar styles influenced by blues, country, old-time, swing, jazz and all of the American Roots styles. This collection of 30 Acoustic Americana Licks You MUST Know is presented by singer, songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist and Grammy Award winner Cathy Fink.

Cathy is a passionate educator and has taught banjo, guitar, fiddle, vocal styles, harmony singing and songwriting at music camps all over the country. “You’ll find that most of these licks are easily played with either a flat-pick or with fingerpicks. If you’re a songwriter, you’re going to enjoy adding more exciting colors to your chords. These licks will fit right into all of the songs you already know and might even inspire new original songs. You'll find them all easy to learn and easy to incorporate into your playing”

Cathy’s collection of 30 licks spans a wide variety of Americana styles and techniques. For example, you’ll learn an easy but very contemporary sounding G to Am7 vamp, and then a very interesting Am to D7 lick that lands you very tastefully in the key of G. ‘Extending the Line’ is a great application of double-stops running all the way up the guitar neck. ‘The Outlaw’ is a simple vamp lick that conveys the feeling of a western movie swingin’ between A minor and G.

You’ll also tap into the power of drones in Drop D tuning. You’ll also pick up an edgy, Tony Rice-inspired bluegrass lick that you can play between a D and a C. Using suspensions and chord variations, Cathy will show you how to freshen up a basic C, F and G progression to make it sound more interesting to your audience.
You’ll learn classic, must-know finger picking licks, cascading lines and tasty chromatic bass lines. Cathy rounds out the course with a series of bluegrass and country licks influenced by the great Lester Flatt.

Those are just a few of the 30 must-know Americana licks in Cathy’s cherry-picked collection — plenty of new techniques and powerful creative approaches to completely overhaul your acoustic flat-picking and finger-picking chops. Best of all, they’re easy to learn so you can put them work immediately in your own repertoire and/or compositions.

Cathy demonstrates all of the licks over a click track for rhythmic reference, and then breaks them down, note-by-note emphasizing the key concepts and techniques employed in the performance of the lick.

All of the licks are tabbed and notated for your practice, reference and study purposes. You’ll also get Guitar Pro files so that you can loop and/or slow down the licks as you work through them.

Grab your guitar and let’s get Americana with Cathy Fink!