Country Style Guitar

[wtfismyname4]

Does anyone have any suggestions to how i can become a better country guitar player? I know my major and pentatonic scales, and my major and minor chords.

[jimmy_kwtx]

Focus a little on your chord playing in terms of pick up notes and walking bass lines with chords.

Also learn key shifts.

[elklandercc]

Country guitarists tend to do a lot of slide guitar. I;m not saying you should go out and get a lap steel guitar, but if you donlt have one, you should get a slide. They're pretty cheap, around $5.

[jimmy_kwtx]

Sorry to disagree-- but being from Texas and we listen to allot of Country, pedal steel is not the norm. Allot of the new country coming out is moving more towards a blues based rock.

The pedal steel sound is becoming more and more classified to the "country and western" genre.

But all in all country can be more defined by the backing rhythm and the vocals.

[wtfismyname4]

How about more along the lines of playing lead guitar? I know for chords they use alot of I, II, IV, V's. Any other suggestions i'm all ears. Thank you to anyone who response.

[Mark Pav]

Does anyone have any suggestions to how i can become a better country guitar player?

Get a cheap truck and a cheatin' woman.


Err, ok. For country lead playing, you mostly wanna play out of the major scale. It helps to embellish chords with little major scale riffs, too. Actually, if you take a lot of Jimi Hendrix's rhythm ideas and speed them up they sound very much like modern country.

I'm not helping very much, but my glasses are bent and giving me a headache.

[Fret spider]

learn how to hybrid pick, ( a pick and your third and fourth finger)

try to play arround the majour pentatonic but add quite a few chromatic notes in.

but the best way to get good at a new genre is practice some songs, learn some stuff. i would recomend Albert Lee

[Fret spider]

heres some albert lee stuff if u are interested. soz i dont know how to do them as one document so i had to do them seperatly

[Fret spider]

heres the last one

[wtfismyname4]

Thanks for the advice, i think the parts that get me is when they play multiple notes at the same time. When they play individual notes it's easy to learn, but when it's multiple notes like two or three at a time it's hard to pick up. Thanks for the input.

[Fret spider]

for playing multiple notes use the pick for the base note and then 2nd or third finger for the other two strings, at least thats what i do, it also helps for string skipping.

as to when to play them, they normally are part of chords, and they can be used as breaks in the fast pased lead.

[williefred14]

buy a tele ,learn a few doudle stops, i live 30 miles from nashville, and have been playing pedal steel for almost 5 years,it's on almost all my demos,and on 60% of of commercial radio, when playing old country just play the melody.i'm also learning country guitar. hope it helps a little.