Dan Patlansky Rhapsody in blues

Here Adrian Clark takes a private lesson in progressive contemporary blues-rock guitar from one of today’s hottest exponents of the style.

After our chat about his new album, Perfection Kills, we thought we’d quizz Dan for some insights into his playing approach. He rewarded us with a treasure trove of licks and riffs, as well as his ‘slap’ technique: more often heard on the bass guitar, this is a thing that quite a few guitar players are incorporating into their style. We also asked Dan to play a 12-bar blues with enough licks to keep your practice schedule full for weeks, and he was more than happy to oblige.

Patlansky speaks openly about his route to becoming the guitarist he is today, via players such as Clapton, the Kings and especially David Gilmour and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and has no trouble revealing these influences in his playing, while retaining a more than healthy dollop of himself.

Dan begins his lesson with some rhythm work and talks about how Hendrix played “off the chord”. What he means by this is ditching standard barre chords in favour of ‘thumb over the top’ playing that releases the fingers to play licks as well. Dan talks about how to play Minor and Major Pentatonic double-stops “off the chord” for that typical Little Wing sound we all love, and adds some dazzling Pentatonic licks to show what he means. “You can take any song you have written or any song you know,” he adds, “and play it ‘off the chords’.”He then creates a G-D-Em-C progression and demonstrates how he might negotiate it using this approach.

Slap technique is something guitarists such as Reggie Wooten and Guthrie Govan excel at, and Dan uses it brilliantly too. He explains the nuts and bolts of tapping for guitar, using a triplet feel and ‘ghost’ notes. He invents a riff on the spot and embellishes it with some impressive slapping in drop D tuning. “The way to think of it is ‘pick with the thumb, slap with the thumb, and pick with the first finger,” he explains. “Then it’s all about adding the ‘ghost’ notes, which are rhythmic notes that aren’t really notes.”

Dan then talks about how he likes to think about the fretboard, theory and playing as simply as possible. The way he views the neck is in relation to the Pentatonic ‘box’ shapes (see Technique Focus). It’s all about tension and release, he tells us, and about learning which nonPentatonic notes (or ‘outside’ as Dan refers to them) can start to be blended with the more ‘home’ based vocabulary. In his playing you’ll notice he often takes a mofif, be it a two-note cell or even a three-note arpeggio, and repeats it chromatically down the neck; some of these notes are indeed outside the Pentatonic shapes, but don’t sound ‘wrong’ because there’s clearly a destination in Dan’s mind and the lick always resolves at that destination.

To conclude his one-to-one lesson Patlansky now puts much of what he’s discussed into a fantastic off-the-cuff 12-bar solo in A. You can clearly hear the post SRV style that many players now take and make their own - such as John Mayer, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and even Joe Bonamassa at times. These guys dig in hard, often using snappy ‘back rakes’ to link high and low phrases in a lick. They are also masters of dynamics and in this solo you can clearly see how Dan cleans or dirties up his sound by constantly referring to his Strat’s volume control. There’s lots to learn, so have fun!

it’s about tension and release and learning which nonpentatonic notes can be blended wi th ‘home’ based vocab