100 Essential Blues Licks

This little bundle consists of 100 licks you can use in just about any blues setting. All of these examples are demonstrated in the overall key of A, but you should be able to transpose them into whatever key you need to play in.

The licks are divided into four different groups:

• 25 "All Purpose" licks which can be used over all three chords in a typical 12 bar blues (A7 D7 & E7). Each of these licks are demonstrated over each of these three chords in turn so you can hear how they sound in context.

• 25 licks optimised to work over the I chord of A7. Each lick is demonstrated over this chord.

• 25 licks optimised to work over the IV chord of D7. Again, each lick is demonstrated over this chord.

• 25 licks optimised to work over the V chord of E7 which are, once again, demonstrated over this chord.

There are four jam tracks to practice the licks over. As you would expect, there is a 12 bar blues jam track which consists of the following chord sequence:

|A7   |D7   |A7   |A7   |

|D7   |D7   |A7   |A7   |

|E7   |D7   |A7   |E7   |

The other jam tracks are of the individual chords alone. Want to work on your A7 licks? Stick on the A7 jam track to practice those without having to worry about keeping track of the chord changes. You can do likewise with both the D7 and E7 jam tracks.

All of the licks are tabbed out in both Guitar Pro and PDF formats. If you use the Guitar Pro TABs you can listen to the timing and the phrasing of each lick in the TAB. You can slow them down and you can loop them as an aid to learning the licks. You can either use Guitar Pro software to open these TABs, or you can search for the free Tux Guitar app which will also open these files.

Finally, don't feel you have to copy these licks slavishly. Feel free to tweak the timing and phrasing to suit your needs and style of playing. Take the beginning of one lick and graft it onto the end of another or vice versa. Treat each and every one of these licks as a starting point to develop your own vocabulary of phrases you can use when improvising. Above all... HAVE FUN!