Polyphoneek Lesson 9 – Ascending Picking Lick With Slides

By Harry Houghton
By Harry Houghton October 21, 2013 December 29th, 2021 News, Soundsphere Guitar Lessons, Videos, Videos Of The Week

This lick will help you ascend the fret board at pace without simply playing up the scale across 6 strings. This lick uses sextuplets (groups of 6 notes) on the G and B strings in E minor but the pattern used can be applied to any two adjacent strings in any scale.

We start in our fourth position of E minor with a downstroke on the C at the fifth fret of the G string then hammer onto the D at the seventh fret using our second finger. We then change to the B string and starting with an upstroke alternate pick the E and F# sharp notes at the fifth and seventh frets, then down to the D at the seventh fret of the G string and back up to the E of the B string.

lesson 9 - ascending picking lick with slides

We then shift up to position five using an upstroke on the D at the seventh fret of the G string sliding up to the E at the ninth fret of the G string this time using our third finger and then play the same pattern using alternate picking through the notes F# and G on the B string, and back down to E on the G string and finishing on the F# of the B string.

We again slide up a position to sixth position with an upstroke and our third finger to the F# at the eleventh fret of the G string using the same pattern through the notes G and A at the eighth and tenth frets of the B string. Then again we go back down the F# on the G string and back up to the G before we slide up to position seven. This time we use our second finger to slide to the G at the twelfth fret of the G string. We follow a similar fingering to our first sextuplet through G then A and B on the B string and back to down to G and up to A before sliding up into first position at the A note at the fourteenth fret of the G string using our third finger.
We are now back to our usual fingering and play through A at the fourteenth fret of the G string, up to B and C and the twelfth and thirteenth frets of the B string, down to the A and back up to the B. We conclude this lick by against shifting up to second position by sliding into the B note at the sixteenth fret of the G string with our third finger and keeping with our previous sequence play through C and D at the thirteenth and fifteenth fret of the B string, down to the B then back up to the C at the thirteenth fret, and finally bend the D at the fifteenth fret up a tone to E using your and upstroke and your third finger and add plenty of vibrato.

This lick allows you have more melodic content when trying to ascend the neck at speed and works well on other adjacent strings, you can even change where the slide goes or apply the pattern to pentatonic shapes for even more variety.

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