9 Ways To Make Up New Blues Guitar Licks
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." — Proverb
Learn a blues guitar lick from a book, video or teacher, and you feed yourself for a day. But learn how to turn each lick you learn into many and you’ll have an endless flow of new licks to feed your playing every day.
Here is a list of simple techniques that will help you turn every blues guitar lick you learn into an abundant supply of new licks to practice. Apply as many, or as few, of them as you like to create endless ideas and avoid the trap of playing the same licks over and over again.
1. Change Octaves
An easy change is to play exactly the same lick an octave higher or lower. You’ll develop your knowledge of the fretboard and of different scale positions as well as exercise your fingers with different fingering patterns.
2. Change Key
Simply move a lick up or down the fretboard and you change its key. This is another great way to build your familiarity with the guitar fretboard.
3. Change Rhythm Pattern
Keep the original lick’s note pitches but make some changes to the rhythm pattern. Simply replace some note durations with different values. Your new licks don’t have to remain the same length as the original but if they do then they can be easily interchanged.
4. Change Notes
You can also start to play around with the pitches of the notes in your lick. Add an ascending movement instead of a descent, or vice versa, or try out larger or smaller intervals between notes. You can change as few or as many notes as you like.
5. Change Playing Effects
Add, remove, move or swap playing effects such as bends, slides, hammers and vibrato. You can also add chromatic movements to lead into notes from a half step (or more) below or above.
6. Reverse
This is a change that’s quite simple to do, but might not be so easy to play. Put the lick into reverse order and play it backwards from the last note to the first note.
7. Shuffle
Shuffle a lick by taking parts of it and changing their order, for example, reverse bars one and two of a two bar lick. You can shuffle beats within bars too.
8. Call And Response
Another good way to create new licks is to play the lick as a question and make up answers in call and response style.
Just play the original lick and then follow it up with whatever it inspires in you. In reality you will use many of the techniques described above when you do this, but the difference is that you learn to do it spontaneously. Remember to write down the licks you make up this way for future reference.
9. Change Tempo
Here’s a change that has to be included for completeness. It’s a very simple change, and easy to overlook, but often the whole character of a lick will change, not to mention the technical challenge it presents…
Now you know nine ways to make up new blues guitar licks to practice. You can make up a lot of licks if you change only one thing at a time, if you combine two or more changes you’ll create a huge number of new possibilities.
Put these tips into practice to grow your blues guitar lick vocabulary and create personalized licks of your own inspired by those of your heroes. You can apply these techniques to the licks you pick up from books and magazines, or teachers you follow. Multiply the benefits of all these sources by learning how to easily create dozens of new licks from every one that you learn from them.
