Joel Hoekstra plays his Gibson Custom Shop Les Paul, which has a gold-plated Whitesnake medallion set into the body The first thing I often notice with a lot...
Joel Hoekstra plays his Gibson Custom Shop Les Paul, which has a gold-plated Whitesnake medallion set into the body
The first thing I often notice with a lot of beginner and intermediate rock guitar players whom I teach is that their articulation—the way in which they’re playing a note—is rather bland and lifeless.
Learning to employ various pick- and fret-hand techniques effectively can be the most important aspect of making what you play sound more expressive, musical and professional. And so I’ve put together this lesson with the beginner-to-intermediate player in mind. We’ll begin by taking a simple, ordinary phrase and explore various ways to make it come to life and sound cool and musical.
FIGURE 1 shows the standard fifth-position A minor pentatonic scale pattern that many rock guitarists learn early on, which serves as the foundation of rock soloing, as pioneered by our first guitar heroes of the Sixties and Seventies. We hear it in virtually every one of our favorite rock solos. You can go a long way using just the minor pentatonic scale if you explore some of the many different ways in which you can possibly articulate a phrase. So here are 15 different ways to “color” your notes.
1. PALM MUTING
For the purposes of demonstration, we’re going to use a consistent phrase that we’ll alter only by the way in which the notes are articulated. FIGURE 2 illustrates a simple eight-note phrase based on the A minor pentatonic scale. The first technique I’d like to demonstrate as a way to color your notes is to apply palm muting (P.M.). Lean the edge of your pick-hand palm across all of the strings next to the bridge saddles. Done correctly, this contact of flesh against the strings will deadens