50 Fingerpicking Licks You Must Know (2014, Truefire)

“That kid woke the blues back up.” - Buddy Guy. 500 years from now, the blues will still be very much alive. As they are prone to do today, musicologists, critics and blues aficionados will still be crafting top-ten blues guitarist lists and debating who was the greatest of them all. Meanwhile, students of guitar just like us will be copping SRV licks because there will never be an artist who has had as much impact and influence on electric blues guitar as Stevie Ray Vaughn.

“That kid woke the blues back up.” - Buddy Guy. 500 years from now, the blues will still be very much alive. As they are prone to do today, musicologists, critics and blues aficionados will still be crafting top-ten blues guitarist lists and debating who was the greatest of them all. Meanwhile, students of guitar just like us will be copping SRV licks because there will never be an artist who has had as much impact and influence on electric blues guitar as Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Nicolas Slonimsky published the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns in 1947, which was largely ignored for years until the likes of John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Allan Holdsworth, Frank Zappa, Paul Grabowsky and many other significant artists started crediting the material as a source of great inspiration, which sparked highly creative improvisation. Jazz guitar genius, Joe Diorio was likewise inspired by Slonimsky’s work and later published his own highly acclaimed Intervallic Designs, which focuses on a wide variety of intervallic designs for freestyle improvisation.

50 jazz licks you must know inspired by the genre's greats Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to attempt playing any style of jazz guitar without copping inspiration and lickage from the masters of the form. What?! This ridiculous notion will self-destruct in ten seconds because that would unquestionably be an impossible mission.

Asking fingerstyle virtuoso, prolific composer and top recording artist Pete Huttlinger to open up his playbook and share his favorite moves is like asking David Copperfield to reveal his favorite illusions. Both are widely-acclaimed as masters in their respective fields, and both have dedicated a lifetime of study and practice to perfect their art.

Top educator, player and author of dozens of instructional publications, Rich Maloof presents 50 acoustic guitar licks covering a broad range of crucial acoustic techniques you MUST know! Maloof's handpicked range of phrases, concepts and techniques will help guide your development of the tools, techniques and vocabulary you'll need to take your acoustic guitar playing to the next level.

While a single-note line a lick is certainly fair game in here, the bread-and-butter of acoustic playing is covered in 50 lessons demonstrating fingerpicking patterns, open-string voicings, changes with bass lines, alternate tunings, Brit-pop strums, left-hand mutes, double-stops, funk patterns, alternating bass, movable chord-shapes, advanced voicings with open strings, barre chords concepts, Travis-picking, descending bass lines, hammer-ons and pull-offs, alternate chord voicings, movable chord shapes with pedal tones, advanced chord voicing concepts including open strings integration, mixing barre chords with open strings, and harmonics. Rich also shows you the tips and tricks that help set the styles of such acoustic masters as Chet Atkins, Neil Young, Pete Townshend, James Taylor and Jimmy Page apart from the pack. Add these 50 licks to your acoustic arsenal and you'll have the insight and chops to deliver the perfect mood and texture for any tune – from acoustic power comping to delicate fingerstyle work.