By the way, in this lick, we're dealing with 16th notes and 16th note triplets at around 85 BPM, so it's no slouch! I would say it's advanced in its nature simply due to the speed!
Start for free
Joe Bonamassa is one hell of a guitar player! His super fast pentatonic lead runs are the aspiration of a lot of players, including myself! In this blog post and video, we take one of his epic licks (as seen on his Guitarist video) and place it over a track to put it in context. We then break it down to get to grips with the whole thing. If you aspire to play fast bluesy rock runs, you will love this!
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Dan Holton
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The Video
Before you read on, watch the video below to get a real understanding and a full breakdown of this cool lick! The downloads of the audio file and GP file can be found here. Please note that the tab is played in a "lazy" blues way, but written as straight 16th notes… So you bring the style!
Joe Bonamassa study
If you love Joe Bonamassa, did you know we have a full player study for you to dive into! It's five units of pure Joe, covering his blues, rock, speed and phrasing… Everything you need to play like the legend himself!
The lick
The first thing to do is have a few listens to the lick to get it in your head. The key to this is learning the lick in sections and visualising the underlying scale shapes. The whole thing is based in E minor and uses mainly E minor pentatonic and some E natural minor scale notes. So, let's have a look at the tab for the lick first:
I've now taken that one stage further and broken the tab image into colourful sections to help you visualise the pentatonic shapes that we are using. This will help you be able to use this lick and transpose it all across the fretboard when you come to work with it in the future. So, here is that super colourful tab:
The shapes
To help you spot all the shapes of this E minor pentatonic scale, I have drawn them all out below for you. In a few places across the neck, Joe has added a note from the natural minor scale, which we've highlighted on the fretboard diagrams too. Do your best to match up the tab above with the fretboard diagrams below!
The rhythms
The final piece of the puzzle is to start working with the two types of note subdivisions in this piece. We're using either 16th-note patterns or 16th-note triplets. Now, this is not for the faint-hearted, as even the 16th notes can feel a little speedy, but the 16th note triplets feel like fire (hence the awesome title image!). For your information, a 16th note subdivision means that you are hitting 4 notes per beat (and therefore 16 within a bar). A 16th note triplet means you are hitting 6 notes per beat, which is 24 per bar. You can see the step up is quite dramatic.
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I really like to count "bi be di bo ba di" when doing 16th note triplets, as that gives me an easy way to spell out 6 notes per beat! At 85BPM this will still feel very fast.
Dan Holton
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Speed building
If this lick feels a long way out of reach at the moment, I would highly recommend diving into our two speed-building courses, as shown below. Level 1 is a beginner's guide to building speed, and level 2 is intermediate upwards!
Good luck!
I would highly recommend adding this lick to one of your long-term guitar goals, as it will take time. Be patient, keep turning up to practice, and keep working with those speed-building courses. You'll get it, trust me!