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10 Guitar Licks You Must Know

Learn how to play 10 must-know guitar licks with this free course download!

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10 Guitar Licks You Must Know
TrueFire

TrueFire

Educator

roots rock, country, blues, jam band, blues-rock, rock, r&b, jazz

Genres

About this course

NEWLY UPDATED! New licks as of July 2024. Enjoy!

Unlock your guitar potential with the 10 Guitar Licks You Must Know course, exclusively on TrueFire. This free course, expertly crafted from 10 courses by top-notch instructors including Greg Koch, Andy Wood, Rick Stickney, and others, is designed for guitarists of all levels who want to enhance their improvisation and soloing skills.

Dive into ten essential licks that cover a range of styles, from blues to rock to country and beyond. Each lick is broken down in detailed video lessons, complete with tabs and notation to ensure you can master them at your own pace.

Whether you're looking to add new flavors to your solos or refine your technique, this course provides the foundational licks every guitarist needs in their arsenal. Start playing like a pro today with TrueFire's 10 Guitar Licks You Must Know.

What you'll learn

  • Play pentatonic scales horizontally across strings for varied phrasing
  • Combine left-hand vibrato with tremolo arm vibrato for expressive bends
  • Use pre-bending technique to create smooth melodic phrases
  • Create expressive, never-the-same-twice bends using multiple vibrato sources
  • Create melodic fills starting on off-beats (beat three)
Release date: 10/01/2021 • 0h 38m runtime
late beginnerintermediateacoustic guitarguitarelectric guitarsoloinglicks
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Sample lessons
Swell Moanin'
Swell Moanin'
Blues-Rock
Garcia's 3rds
Garcia's 3rds
Jam Band
50's Doc Watson Rockabilly Ragtime in C
50's Doc Watson Rockabilly Ragtime in C
Country
Look Up Here
Look Up Here
Bluegrass

What's included

10 lessons • 9 charts • 9 Jam Tracks

HOPO Heaven
This first series of 10 videos will focus on lesson that utilize a major chord tonality.

These hammer-on pull-off combinations played over a major chord in the relative minor pentatonic position are pure gold. Resolving to the double-stop at the end is the icing on the cake.
Swell Moanin'
Let's jump right in with a lil' somethin I call Swell Moanin! It involves a little volume slur and palm action on the tremolo arm a.k.a. Mr. Wiggles. First I'll play the lick then I'll break it down for you in detail!
Garcia's 3rds
This lick is a Jerry Garcia inspired Mixolydian lick connecting a V chord to a IV chord. It's a chromatic run that connects the 3rds of the two chords in the key of B Mixolydian.
50's Doc Watson Rockabilly Ragtime in C
Here's a lick inspired by Doc Watson from the 50's rockabilly era, played in open position.
Look Up Here
Here's another bluesy bluegrass lick in G called "Look Up Here". Here we're using a combination of the major and minor pentatonic scale, often called a "mixture lick" where we've got some fun chromatic tones, too.
We're Rollin'
Playing notes on the same fret on adjacent strings helps produce some seriously cool licks. The technique is called “rolling” and this lick gets you doing just that with ascending rolls. To make the rolls happen in bars 1-2 your fret hand first finger needs to fret the fourth (D) string, 7th fret A, then following the hammer-on, fold over onto the third (G) string, 7th fret D. What you’re going for is a smooth transition from note to note that accomplishes two key things: It doesn’t allow both notes to ring together nor, on the contrary, do you hear a gap between them. The preceding whole step (two frets) hammer-on helps gets you started with rolling by breaking up the adjacent string picking. Take it slow and be critical of note separation.
The Mighty Triplet
Using Triplets in a lick is a wonderful way to decorate the line. Be sure to consider the original phrase when add triplets because it compresses the original line. Work out the phrasing and technique to make the triplets sound smooth and natural.

+ 3 more lessons

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Reviews

38 results

Squeezi

10/08/21

I'm hooked

Great licks, for me some of these lessons doubled as a warm up exercises but they still sounds like the beginnings of good solos. It was also a great intro to how True fire courses are laid out and I'm definitely going to be dining into more as a result. Thanks for this free taste tester.

Txeroki

05/19/21

Great learning method

The materials and tools available for learning the licks phrase by phrase at your own pace are just perfect in my opinion. They allow me to repeat the licks and memorize them in no time, which is great for expanding my guitar vocabulary.

superbeatnik

05/08/21

Great intro to Truefire!

This was the first course I ever got, and it’s a great sampler of the quality of teaching that Truefire offers. Lots of great licks, and they include a few by some of the instructors who have become my favorites on this site. Check it out, find the instructors you resonate with, and find your path!

scruffyburrito

05/03/21

Nice licks!

Really good round-up of licks almost every mid to late beginner can do, and way easier to just check for easy licks here than going through a ton of licks in other courses to find a specific one, I have to congratulate and thank all the masters and teachers involved in the process. Great beginning to the world of truefire

RC

02/14/21

Bravo!

Really good round-up of licks almost every mid to late beginner can do, and way easier to just check for easy licks here than going through a ton of licks in other courses to find a specific one, I have to congratulate and thank all the masters and teachers involved in the process. Great beginning to the world of truefire.

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