Truefire Angus Clark's 50 Hard Rock Guitar Licks You Must Know (2013)

You're feeling mighty fine as you head home after dropping your sweetie off on the doorstep, her kiss still fresh on your lips. The top is down, hair blowing all in your face, big smile on your mug and the radio is blasting your favorite tune. Like the rest of us, you struggle singing along to some of the lyrics (for the record, it's "blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night") but no problem scatting those killer guitar solos note-for-note. That's radio rock guitar baby – tasty, melodic, memorable solos guaranteed to trigger involuntary air-guitar convulsions.

Top NYC recording and performing artist, Angus Clark is your radio rock jock for this collection of 50 Radio Rock Licks You MUST Know inspired by the likes of Jeff Beck, Kirk Hammett, Jimi Hendrix, Mike McReady, Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, Neal Schon, Steve Lukather, John Shanks, Trevor Rabin and David Gilmour. Not only is Angus one of the scene's go-to rock players, but he's also a passionate educator whose clinics and workshops always pull standing-room only audiences. Angus covers a lot of ground in this collection of lickage. You'll learn how to build tasty rockin' lines with the major scale, how to apply pre-bends and releases in your solos for optimal impact, pull-offs, slides, arpeggiated phrases, mixed major and minor pentatonic lines, repeating motives, intervallic lines, double-stops and triads, "money-maker" licks, suspended chord arpeggios, repetition licks, Mixolydian lines, ostinato patterns, and even how to pull melodic ideas from classical music and old standards. In short, plenty to keep you happily busy in the shed for many moons.

This particular generation of Hard Rock bands produced dozens of rock guitar gods; Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, Randy Rhoads, Adrian Smith, Michael Schenker, Slash, Yngwie Malmsteen, Warren DeMartini, Dave Murray, Vivian Campbell, Zakk Wylde and George Lynch to name but a few. Their collective contributions took electric guitar to a new level of virtuosity way beyond mega-volume, distortion, power chords and the pentatonic scale. To play in the game you need an arsenal of chops; trilling, sliding, modal variations, harmonized lead lines, sophisticated phrasing, expressive vibrato, muting, sweeps, shifting positions, dozens of new bending techniques , hammers, pull-offs, legato, open strings, chromatics, groupings and plenty of did-el-ee-bums. Angus covers it all in 50 Hard Rock Licks You MUST Know!

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.

A comprehensive collection of intervallic approaches for rock guitar. 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.

The path from pentatonic sameness to heavy jazzed blues cat-itude often appears strewn with mystifying theoretical explanations and effete bossa renditions of "The Days of Wine and Roses." Feh! David Hamburger's 50 Jazz-Blues Licks You MUST Know cuts right to the chase, offering up some of the baddest, bopping-est, funkiest and bluesiest ways to navigate through any shuffle, boogaloo, minor blues or jazz-blues chord changes. Hamburger digs deep into the 50s and 60s, when labels like Blue Note, Prestige and Riverside were serving up the funky, down-home music of guitarists like Kenny Burrell, Grant Green and Wes Montgomery, all of whom inspired some of the jazzed blues lickage in this collection. These alone are worth the price of admission, but as we all know, Hamburger is the consummate over-achiever and he sure didn't stop there…

Take any ten of your favorite blues-rock players and you’ll likely find that while they all have their own distinctive sound and vibe, they also all share a few common qualities; solid rhythm work, tasty solos, and a big bag of head-turning licks to punctuate their improvisations with. You can never have too many of these head-turners at your command, which is why you’ll get a lot of mileage out Jeff McErlain’s 30 Smokin’ Blues Rock Licks You MUST Know!