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Hybrid Picking Guitar Licks
Hybrid Picking Guitar Licks - Get Those Right-Hand Fingers Working
After the last batch of blues licks, I was in the mood for some hybrid picking guitar licks country style.
This blog post will present a mix of styles once all the latest vertical video licks have been released. Although I was thinking of country guitar, these hybrid picking licks will work in many types of music and inspire you to create different sounds.
What Is Hybrid Picking?
Classical guitarists use their fingers and many rock players generally use a pick. Swapping between using a plectrum and using your fingers can cause problems if you play a range of styles.
You could opt for the pick-in-the-mouth approach when swapping to fingerstyle guitar, although having your pick leave and then re-enter your fingers is not ideal. This is where hybrid picking works really well.
Hybrid picking uses a combination of the pick and fingers when plucking the strings. Not only does this allow more than one string to be played at the same time, but crossing strings and playing wide intervals is easier when using both your pick and your fingers.
I often choose to use hybrid picking for the difference in dynamics and tone this technique produces.
What About A Thumb Pick?
In recent years, I have moved over to using a thumb pick. I used to hate thumb picks, although I was using a pick-and-finger approach so often in my playing, that it made sense to persevere with a thumb pick.
Thumb picks allow hybrid picking to be an integral part of your guitar playing as they free up a finger and allow you to seamlessly swap between a full fingerpicking sound to using a pick.
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Country Finger Picking Lick
Get your country guitar hat on with this fingerpicking workout. Open strings are used to create a nice rhythmic pattern that can be used for many songs in this style.
This lick was inspired by the style of Merle Travis. Many guitarists use Travis picking to great effect in their playing and it is a style that every guitarist should a least investigate.Â
Country Guitar Open String Lick
Hybrid picking is the perfect technique when playing open-string guitar licks and ideas. Not only does the pick-and-finger approach allow you to play the lick cleanly, but it also offers great dynamic interest to the overall sound of the lick.
Be sure to break this lick into smaller parts as there are many subtle open-string ideas that could be the seed to inspire longer original lines of your own.
This type of lick also works extremely well when playing acoustic guitar. Always good to have a few of these types of licks ready to break out when the time is right.
Open String Bluesy Cascade
This "tumbling down the stairs" type of open-string lick is great fun to play. It is also another great example of a lick that is perfectly suited to hybrid picking.
I use this type of lick mainly when playing acoustic guitar, although it also works great for electric guitar. The snap that can be achieved when playing the lick on an acoustic guitar creates great excitement in solos.
A7 Arpeggio 7-Note Sequence
This is a simple arpeggio lick that works equally well when using a conventional picking technique. The pick-and-fingers approach has once again been used to create a different dynamic and tonal result than when simply picking the strings using a plectrum.
This lick can easily be inserted into solos when playing most styles of music. Try using the lick in a blues or funk solo and move it around to different keys.
Diminished Scale Major Triads
Hybrid picking allows easy access to strings when playing large interval jumps. The picking technique should be chosen as an artistic choice for how something sounds rather than to make things easier, but the technique does make crossing strings much easier.
 The major triads might be difficult to spot in this example as they have been broken up quite a bit, although it is the major triads that I had in my head when playing this lick.
Dominant 7th Open String Lick
This is a fun little lick that produces a powerful sound. I often use this type of idea when playing acoustic guitar as the snap of the strings combined with the pull-offs to open strings produces a pleasing sound to my ears.
Try this lick with various scale types as the technique allows intervallic jumps that would otherwise be difficult to execute. Also, experiment by playing ideas at different points along the guitar fretboard as the interval relationships to the open strings will be different depending on which position you are playing.
Melodic Minor String Skipping
String skipping and hybrid picking work extremely well together. Not only does using a pick-and-finger approach allow the jumping across the strings to be easier, but the added accents and dynamic variations make for a more interesting musical idea.
You could also simply pick this lick as the hammer-ons and pull-offs will give you time to move the pick the distance required to cross the strings, but I do like a bit of dynamic variation.
Blues C7 Chord Vamping
Creating more of a pianistic sound on the guitar requires the use of a pick-and-finger approach. I just had to include one of these types of licks when talking about hybrid picking.
This type of idea works well in many forms of music and really helps you to understand more about harmony.
Harmonics Lick Harping D9
This is another example of a lick that is impossible to play using only a pick. Cascading harmonics are fun to play and create a nice effect.
Due to the position of the front pickup on a Fender Telecaster, harmonics can be difficult to produce when using the harping harmonics technique. I switched to the bridge pickup for this example.
Many players use the harping harmonics technique in their playing. Tommy Emmanuel and Chet Atkins are two great examples, although one must listen to the master of this technique - Lenny Breau. Lenny was an exceptionally talented guitarist in every style imaginable and his use of harping harmonics was unbelievable.
Harmonic Minor Triads Over E7
The harmonic minor scale is such a cool sound and much fun can be had with the harmonic minor scale when it comes to musical experimentation.
This lick uses two triads from the A harmonic minor scale over an E7 chord. Hybrid picking works exceptionally well once again with this type of lick.
Using the pick and fingers results in a more pianistic sound than when strumming the chords. The pick-and-finger approach also makes it easier to pluck only the strings used in each chord shape. Strumming would require quite a bit of open-string muting.
10th intervals create a skeleton structure of a chord. As the two notes are on strings that are far apart, using your pick and a finger makes perfect sense when playing 10th intervals.
Can you figure out which song this chord progression is from? A famous band that formed in the 90s wrote this song as a clue.
Try using 10th intervals with other chord progressions. I especially like using 10th intervals when playing acoustic guitar.
Intervallic Leaps - Gmaj7
Anytime you are leaping across strings, hybrid picking will make the jumps easier. Moving the pick large distances at a fast tempo is extremely difficult. The tonal variation between a hard plectrum and a soft finger also creates musical interest.
This type of lick will certainly help you to learn interval relationships on the guitar fretboard.
Also try picking all the notes using only a plectrum as this will give you a difficult challenge.
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