Open Country
THE TASTEFUL APPLICATION of open-string licks is a cornerstone and hallmark of polished country lead-guitar playing, right up there with chicken pickin’ and bending the strings of a Fender Telecaster. Every great country picker, from Chet Atkins to Brad Paisley, has a cache of open-string licks that they can employ at the drop of a hat in various guitar-friendly keys (namely the ones without “sharp” or “flat” in their name). Owing a considerable debt to the rolling banjos and cascading fiddles of bluegrass masters like Earl Scruggs and Kenny Baker, country guitar legends like James Burton and Albert Lee seamlessly wove open strings into the fabric of their technique, crafting blistering openposition runs and complexly layered melodies filled with chiming open notes. These cool-sounding techniques have influenced many other modern country lead guitarists, such as Brent Mason and Vince Gill, who have used them to create tastefully dazzling licks of their own.
In this lesson, we’re going to dive into various approaches to harnessing open strings, including bluegrass-style 1st-and 2nd-position runs and the incorporation of open notes into patterns and shapes played past the 5th fret. Be sure to pay attention to the fret-hand and pick-hand fingerings indicated here, many of which are essential to performing the line as intended. Some exercises use basic flatpicking while others incorporate hybrid picking, in which certain notes are flatpicked and others are picked with the bare middle or ring finger, as indicated by the traditional Spanish abbreviations from classical guitar notation: m = middle finger, a =
