Open String Blues

Holiday Greetings guitar slingers! In this final tutorial of 2008, I will leave you with a blues tune that focuses on combining open strings and hybrid-picking. Pay close attention to the synchronization between the left and right hands, and also on getting the triplet-shuffle groove steady in the right hand. Once you've listened through this first part, go into the breakdown parts to get some right/left hand close-ups of the action! Also, try to incorporate these ideas into your own playing, maybe taking an old line you know and adding open strings with hybrid-picking, or try playing that Gilbert'esque string-skipping lick using hybrid-picking instead. Good keys to try it in are E, G, A and B (as in this example). I unfortunately had a slip of the tongue in the video and said "F" instead of G, my bad =). (F is NOT a good key to try to incorporate these open string pentatonic ideas.)