This blues guitar lick is fairly simple but very useful. It's not fast or flashy, but it's sort of "generic", and you can reuse this lick in many blues tunes. It will work almost anywhere! It's played in the key of E, and uses both the open B and open E strings. However, you can play it without open strings and it sounds just as good. Try yourself to play it one octave higher, at the 12th fret.

When playing blues, I have learned over the years that it's more important to play strong, vocal-like lines that draws people in, instead of fast and flashy stuff, which sounds meaningless to 99% of the population. Keep that in mind when you are playing solos - a good to practice is to SING the lines as you are playing them. It will make your solos more vocal-like and likely more interesting to listen to.

I named the lick "Squeeze It" just for fun, and so that I can keep all these licks apart in some ways when someone is talking about them. Sometimes I get emails like "how you bend that note in that blues lick lesson?" Yeah, which blues lick! There's lots of them here.... so that's why you'll see my licks have silly little names from now on!

By the way, I was thinking of the how Stevie Ray Vaughan sang the song "Close To You" when I made up this lick. It's not exactly the same thing, but the first four notes have some similarity.

View YouTube Lesson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RTJ-RSkiPaY

Source: DolphinStreet.com