Difficulty: 3.0 out of 5

This is part two of a mini lesson series on playing lead guitar in a country and bluegrass style. In part one, you learned how to play two guitar breaks for “Cripple Creek” using the song’s traditional melody. In this guitar lesson, you’ll learn eight extremely useful flatpicking guitar licks and I’ll show you three easy ways to use these flatpicking licks to spice up your country and bluegrass guitar solos. The concepts in this lead guitar lesson will help you improvise a hard-driving bluegrass guitar break over “Cripple Creek” and these concepts can also be applied to a ton of other country and bluegrass songs.

• Overview
• Using the Licks
• Flatpicking Licks
• Backing Track

In the previous guitar lesson in this course, I showed you five of the most common ways to build a guitar solo and we talked about several techniques that will help you improvise better guitar solos. We also discussed the first type of solo in detail — the melodic guitar solo.

In this guitar lesson, you’ll learn about the second type of guitar solo where we’ll play stock country & bluegrass licks over the top of a standard chord progression. First, I’ll teach you four stock country and bluegrass guitar licks. We’ll talk about how to use these licks to play a hard-driving guitar solo in a country and bluegrass style. Then, I’ll show you some more of my favorite lead guitar improvising techniques. As you’re studying the concepts in this lesson, be sure to also check out the Bluegrass Lick Library and Guitar Scale Charts that we have available at Country Guitar Online. After you complete this lesson, practice your country & bluegrass improvising over the backing track to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” in the key of G. Lesson tablature is available for download below the video.

• Overview
• Playthrough with Tablature
• Guitar Solo & Improvising Tips
• Backing Track