Trading Licks with Robbie Calvo

Robbie Calvo helps you enhance your lead playing with expert concepts to add to your own licks

THE YEARS OF PRACTICE

time spent learning chord and scale shapes burns them into our minds and muscle memory. We’ve all developed a repertoire of stock licks that we can package and repackage at will over most musical situations. I truly advocate having those phrases at your disposal and also believe that those lines define our personality and unique voice on the guitar.

However, I also believe that we should pursue the ability to have independence from those phrases and the freedom to choose what we play and how we play it. In other words, we control our hands, not the other way around! Let me share a few ideas on how to create new lines and be extremely musical in the process.

We’ll be playing over a cool groove in the key of

D major. The chord progression has a very familiar sequence: it’s a I –V– VI– IV in D major: II: D I A I Bmi7 I Gadd2 :II

I’ll be creating my solo from the D major scale located at the 7th-fret position. I’ve chosen this location because it’s the major scale pattern that’s closest in shape to the B minor pentatonic scale (which you could also use over this progression). I do shift either side of the 7th-fret location a couple of times, and I’ll detail why in each of those lick outlines.

My proposal is that we create eight melodic phrases, starting with each note of the scale in ascending order from the tonic (D). This will ensure musical progression and forces us to create a new line from each of the eight scale tones. Of course, we still need to resolve our phrases to a chord tone. The tonal centre of the progression is D, so phrasing towards the tonal centre chord will help you achieve this. You should note that the relative minor, Bm7, also contains three of those D major chord tones.

I’m also specifically placing each of my phrases on the upbeat of 2 (the ‘2+’) to let the phrases ‘breathe’ at the beginning of the bar. If you have trouble targeting the upbeat of 2, count along with the track and verbalise the eighth-note rhythmic subdivisions. (‘1+2+3+4+’).

Analyse and work through each of my phrases until the solo flows naturally – and then take your favourite D major scale pattern and apply my concepts to create your own 16-bar solo. www.robbiecalvo.com