It’s always good to have an ample supply of stock lead guitar licks under your belt for improvisation. And in this video guitar lesson I’m going to show you a cool rapid fire rock guitar lick that comes out of an E Minor pentatonic scale.
Rock Guitar Lick in E
(Video Guitar Lesson)
Rapid Fire Rock Guitar Lick Tablature
A couple of things to note on this guitar lick…
While the guitar tablature above indicates a whole step bend on the first note (full), in reality you don’t have to worry about that too much. It could be a half step bend. Or really it’s just a bend up. You don’t really hear a destination pitch. Before you ever get to anywhere, you are playing the next note on the 2nd string.
Also when you are playing the note on the 2nd string at the 15th fret, you are going to hammer-on to that note. Normally when you play a hammer-on, you pick one note on a string, and then hammer-on to another note that is higher on the same string. In this case you are sounding that note on the 15th fret by just the force of your 3rd finger slamming down on the 2nd string without picking at all.
These types of lead guitar licks are sometimes called “rapid fire licks” because you can easily repeat and chain them together.
Once you have repeated this lick a few times, here is one way you might end it. This is just adding a bend on to the end for a little resolution. When you bend the 2nd string 15th fret up a whole step, that’s actually an E note. And this rock lick is in the key of E.
While this is a lick that’s in the key of E, you can easily move this around on the neck of the guitar to other keys as well. The main centering note for this guitar lick is the 3rd note on the 1st string…that’s an E. If you wanted to move this lick to the key of D, just shift down the neck 2 frets so that note on the 1st string would be a D.
Have fun with your new rapid fire rock guitar lick.
