Mactune
Verified buyer
03/20/26
Great Course
Like his music and the way he teaches
R&B Guitar Fills Playbook
Learn How To Construct Your Own Guitar Fills For Any Genre
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About this course
Learning how to construct and play tasty ‘fills’ is a requisite skill for guitarists that not only elevates your rhythm and lead guitar chops, they also greatly enhance the overall vibe of any musical performance for your audience.
Rick Stickney’s R&B Guitar Fills Playbook presents an easy, yet highly effective approach for constructing your own soulful fills, across the chord progressions that you’ll commonly encounter on the gig or when jamming.
”The tastiest fills you hear in contemporary music root back to the classic Soul and R&B fills of the 60’s and 70’s. These timeless fills can be artfully tweaked to create endless variations of your own.
In this Playbook, I’ll show you how to easily construct your own soulful fills to connect chords, fill around a vocalist, or even use in your own songs.
We’ll play double stops through chord changes, add color and articulation, passing thirds, sliding fourths and sixths, and do it all authentically by adding melody, dynamics and feel.
We’ll apply all of these approaches over some great live jam tracks for real-world musical context.”
You’ll have all of TrueFire’s advanced learning tools at your finger tips to personalize your workspace and learn at your own pace.
You can loop, slow down, or speed up any section of a lesson. Plus, all of the tab and notation is synced to the videos for the optimal learning experience. You’ll also get tab and standard notation files to print out, Guitar Pro files, and all of the backing tracks to practice with.
Grab your guitar, and let’s dig in with Rick Stickney!
Rick Stickney’s R&B Guitar Fills Playbook presents an easy, yet highly effective approach for constructing your own soulful fills, across the chord progressions that you’ll commonly encounter on the gig or when jamming.
”The tastiest fills you hear in contemporary music root back to the classic Soul and R&B fills of the 60’s and 70’s. These timeless fills can be artfully tweaked to create endless variations of your own.
In this Playbook, I’ll show you how to easily construct your own soulful fills to connect chords, fill around a vocalist, or even use in your own songs.
We’ll play double stops through chord changes, add color and articulation, passing thirds, sliding fourths and sixths, and do it all authentically by adding melody, dynamics and feel.
We’ll apply all of these approaches over some great live jam tracks for real-world musical context.”
You’ll have all of TrueFire’s advanced learning tools at your finger tips to personalize your workspace and learn at your own pace.
You can loop, slow down, or speed up any section of a lesson. Plus, all of the tab and notation is synced to the videos for the optimal learning experience. You’ll also get tab and standard notation files to print out, Guitar Pro files, and all of the backing tracks to practice with.
Grab your guitar, and let’s dig in with Rick Stickney!
What you'll learn
- Use passing thirds to create smooth transitions between chord changes
- Create melodic movement within chord progressions
- Use hammer-ons and slides to add feel to chord voicings
- Apply descending thirds with neighboring tone approach
- Connect multiple voicings of the same chord melodically
Release date: 04/06/2023 • 1h 31m runtime
Sample lessons
Spelling Out the Changes with Fills
Demonstration
Where Am I, Where Am I Going?
Performance
Where Am I, Where Am I Going?
Breakdown
Sliding Funky Fills Dm to Em
Performance
What's included
36 lessons • 15 charts • 15 Jam Tracks
R&B Guitar Fills Playbook
Hey, I'm Rick Stickney. Learning how to construct and play tasty ‘fills’ is a necessary skill for guitarists that not only elevates your rhythm and lead chops, they also greatly enhance the overall vibe of any musical performance for your audience.
The tastiest fills you hear in contemporary music root back to the classic Soul and R&B music of the 60’s and 70’s. These timeless fills can be artfully tweaked to create endless variations of your own.
In this Playbook, I’ll show you how to easily construct your own soulful fills to connect chords, fill around a vocalist, or even use in your own songs.
We’ll play double stops through chord changes, add color and articulation, passing thirds, sliding fourths and sixths, and do it all authentically by adding melody, dynamics and feel.
Grab your guitar and let’s dig in.
The tastiest fills you hear in contemporary music root back to the classic Soul and R&B music of the 60’s and 70’s. These timeless fills can be artfully tweaked to create endless variations of your own.
In this Playbook, I’ll show you how to easily construct your own soulful fills to connect chords, fill around a vocalist, or even use in your own songs.
We’ll play double stops through chord changes, add color and articulation, passing thirds, sliding fourths and sixths, and do it all authentically by adding melody, dynamics and feel.
Grab your guitar and let’s dig in.
Course Primer: Seeing Chords as Intervals
Without a doubt, learning to break down large chord shapes into the intervals that reside inside them is probably the most crucial lesson to master for understanding how to construct your own tasty fills. In this course primer, you will learn what an interval is, and how to visualize and extract them from large chord shapes all the way up the neck. You can think of these intervals, such as 3rds, 4ths, and 6ths, as the building blocks of fills. Throughout the entire playbook course, we will constantly reference these intervals and also refer to them as double-stops.
Don't skimp on this one! This lesson will fundamentally change the way you see the guitar and make everything going forward much easier to grasp.
Don't skimp on this one! This lesson will fundamentally change the way you see the guitar and make everything going forward much easier to grasp.
Playing Intervals Through Chord Changes
Once you have learned to extract the intervals from the larger chord shapes in the last lesson, the next step is to start using them through chord changes. In this lesson, we take a simple chord progression, G to Am, and practice using voice leading to find the nearest interval in the next chord. A key part of this is staying on the same strings whenever possible to make the smoothest transitions. We will practice this in several places up the neck over these chords.
Voice Leading a 1364 in G
In this performance, I will demonstrate how to practice playing 3rds, 4ths, and 6ths through a I-iii-vi-IV progression in the key of G major: G-Bm-Em-C. I suggest you start this lesson slowly as written, but as you get more confident, try this same concept through different chord progressions, still concentrating on voice leading to the nearest interval as the chords change.
Voice Leading a 1364 in G
In this breakdown, I will point out some very important ways we were able to keep finding intervals to use in the performance, especially with the 6ths. Sometimes, you will find that the nearest interval is from a chord shape that may not be as obvious as a big barre chord shape. You will learn to extract the intervals from slash chords (such as C/E) and minor 7th chords.
Adding Color to Fills with Hammer-Ons
Now we start to get to the fun stuff! In this demonstration, you will see how easy it is to make these intervals sound musical with the use of hammer-ons to neighboring notes in the scale.
A Major Vamp with Hammer-Ons
This performance shows two of the most common hammer-on fills you must know and how you can find those fills up the neck based on different chord forms, played over a vamp in A major.
+ 29 more lessons
Reviews
29 results
BradBBass1
Verified buyer
12/29/25
R&B Guitar Fills Playbook
I haven't got very far in this course and really enjoy Rick Stickney’s presentation.
jorgemiguel
Verified buyer
11/12/25
R&B PLAYBOOK
Great teacher. Course is very well organised and each lesson builds on top of the other with great music examples and ideas. Really enjoying!
littlesister
Verified buyer
10/27/25
R&B Guitar Fills Playbook
A very useful course probably every aspiring guitarist should follow. It goes back to the source of some of Hendrix’s phrasing that largely came from Curtis Mayfield and other similar artists.
ajbyrne
Verified buyer
10/21/25
Great!
This is a great set of lessons. Very practical and very well done by Rick.
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