5 Santana Licks You Must Know!

We can learn so much from Carlos Santana, and in this blog post and video I want to show you 5 of my absolute favourite Santana licks. I will also show you the theory behind them so that you can use them in your own playing moving forward! This is such an important step in the process of learning licks, and one that is often overlooked. Once you can play the lick as written, the next question to yourself should always be, "how can I make this lick work for me, in every key, within my improvisation?". One huge step for that is understanding the scale and box shape the lick was born in, which is exactly what we'll do here today!

The Lesson

Below is the video for the lesson, which I highly recommend you watch alongside this blog post as you can properly hear and see the licks in action. I also just want to say thank you to the good people of YouTube for watching and enjoying this video! At the time of writing, this video has cumulated 115,000 views 🔥🎸🙌.

The theory

All of the licks we look at are very much based around the Minor Pentatonic PLUS, either Dorian or the Harmonic Minor scales. Alongside Carlos's unique phrasing and technique, these scale choices really make his sound so distinct. Below, we have used the fretboard diagrams to show you the shape we are using for each of these licks, so that you can learn it alongside the lick. Let's dive in:

Lick 1

This relatively simple lick highlights the 6th degree of the scale when sliding to the 7th fret of the B string. This 6th degree is a Dorian note, as it would typically be a b6th in a natural minor scale.

Lick 2

This lick, you could argue, is simply the natural minor scale as it doesn't reference the 6th degree at all. However, I think generally best to be thinking in Dorian with Santana, as he does tend to gravitate towards that sound.

Lick 3

This lick moves us up the fretboard to that 4th position, but once again we are using Dorian. So the best way to visualise that is think of your A minor or A minor pentatonic scale box 4, and then alter the b6th to become the natural 6th!

Lick 4

This lick references the Harmonic minor scale, and once again the best practice is to find your A minor scale or A minor pentatonic box 4 and alter the b7th to become a natural 7th. This gives us the unique sound of harmonic minor.

Lick 5

We end with a relatively simple theory lick, just using the A minor pentatonic box 1. The difficulty here is the speed and ferocity of the lick, as well as playing it way up on the 17th and 20th fret! Good luck!