 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here with MGRmusic.com and today we're going to learn five signature techniques from five classic players. The amp I'm using for the video today is the Blackstar HT20 Mark II. We're going to dial in a couple of different sounds to complement each of the signature techniques so as we go through we'll talk about what we're doing to create those kind of tones. For the first couple of signature techniques I need some single call pickups so I'm using my Schergold Masquerader. The first signature technique we're going to look at is some Stevie Ray Vaughan style Rhythmic Rakes. So this is a great way to give all your 12 bar blue progressions some real cool Texas shuffle. It's a really fun technique to play where we're adding a percussive upward rake across the strings between specific notes that we're playing. To create the tone I'm using the overdrive channel of the amp on a very low gain setting with the ISF all the way to the American side. I've got the bass set to 6, the mid set to 7 and the treble set to 9. I'm also going to be using the neck pickup of the guitar. So there are two main aspects to the Stevie Ray Vaughan raking technique. There's a fretting hand part and a picking hand part. So let's first of all look at the fretting hand part. So with the fretting hand I'm playing a riff. Each one of these notes falls on the beat and this is a two bar riff. Open, third fret on the low E, then the second and fourth on the A string. So that's the first bar. The second bar starts on the second fret of the D. Then it comes back to the third of the E and then the second and fourth on the A again. Then the other side of this is what the picking hand is doing. The picking hand is doing an upward rake like this. We're going to combine these two things together in a triplet shuffle rhythm and that gives us that Stevie Ray Vaughan vibe. So first of all we need to break this down into triplets. So that means we're going to be counting one and a two and a three and a four and a. Each one of those fretted notes is going to land on one of those beats and that's a two bar riff that we played. So if you're putting this into your twelve bar progression that would replace two full bars of the one chord, which would be the E in this case. So once we've started counting this in triplets then we need to put the two hands together. So like I said the fretted notes are coming on the beat and the upward rake is coming on the A before the next beat. So we're essentially counting one, a two, a three, a four, a one. So on those us we've got the upward rake and on the beats we've got one of the fretted notes. So here's the riff nice and slow so you can see the coordination between the hands. Now when it comes to speeding this up don't worry too much about playing it super super tight because Stevie Ray would often play it with a little bit of a rushed feel. So it doesn't have to be dead on the triplet it can be slightly behind or slightly ahead of the triplet beat to get a nice feel to it. As long as it's got a nice shuffle feel to it you'll be fine with it. So here's the riff at full speed. The second technique we're going to look at is some David Gilmour style multi-step bends. So it's going to be like this. To get the tone for this David Gilmour style example I'm using the clean channel of the amp on the British style voice and I've got the tone control all the way down to get a nice warm rounded sound and I'm also using the neck pickup of the guitar once again. So this technique requires quite a bit of finger strength and it can take a while to build that up so don't worry if you can't nail this big bend straight away because we're actually doing a two tone bend here. We're bending the equivalent of four semitones which is four frets. This technique starts by doing a rake into the 13th fret on the B string. So I'm going to rest my finger across the strings and rake downwards like that and then when I get to the B string I'm going to play that note and I'm going to bend it up a full tone. But here's where the Gilmour signature comes in. We're going to release that bend and without picking it again we're then going to bend it a further tone. So this is the two tone bend so we're targeting the 17th fret. So we're bending this note up to the pitch of this which is our first tone and releasing it back then we're bending it up again to this note. And then we're just landing back on that 10th fret of the B string that's based in the D minor pentatonic but you can do that anywhere on the guitar. So a big part of nailing this technique is training your hearing. So what you want to hear is this but as a bend you want to train your hearing to help you pitch that two tone bend. So what you want to do is play the 17th fret note here and just listen to the pitch of that. Get that pitch stuck in your head then bend the 13th fret here up until you hear that same pitch that you just gave yourself the reference of. The third technique we're going to look at is the Jimi Hendrix way of breaking up chords. This is a great way to combine aspects of lead and rhythm playing at the same time. To get the tone for this I'm once again using the clean channel of the amp with the British voice selected but now I've got the tone control up to two just to get a little more sparkle. I'm also using a combination of the neck and the middle single call picker. So we're going to do a simple three chord progression but we're going to spice it up in a real Hendrix way. We're going to be using C sharp minor, B and A. Here's how the technique goes and then we'll break it down. So the first thing to note with this Hendrix style technique is the way that we're playing the chords. We're not just playing them as conventional bar chords, we're playing them as triads with our thumb playing the root note. So the first chord is a minor triad in the C sharp minor position. So I'm playing the C sharp note here on the 11th fret of the D string and I'm barring across the ninth fret on the B and G. My thumb is then playing the root note. Then we'll come to the B major chord. We've got the ninth fret on the D which is our root note, the eighth fret on the G and the seventh fret on the B string. Our thumb is also doubling the root note on the seventh fret of the low E. Because this is a major chord shape we can actually transpose this now so when we play the A chord we can just shift the shape down two frets. We're also embellishing these chords with some notes from the C sharp minor pentatonic scale. So here's what we were doing chord by chord. So for the C sharp minor chord we're picking the root note and the octave. Then we're doing a little hammer-on phrase here on the G and then back on that C sharp again. We come to the B chord. We're just picking the root and strumming the triad. Then we're hitting the A chord as a full chord. A little lead fill coming in so we're starting with a double stop on the fifth fret of the B and E strings and we're hammering on to the seven of the B. Then we're playing that double stop on small. That comes straight out of the chord. Then we're shifting down to the second fret of the low E string and we're doing a hammer-on ascending run from the second to the fourth on the E and A strings. Once we hit this C sharp note here we're actually sliding it up to the sixth fret. When we hit this C sharp note here we're actually sliding that up to the sixth fret of the same string. Then hitting the fourth fret of the D. Then we're doing another hammer-on and pull off phrase on the G from the four to the six and back and land on the six of the D. So here's that run nice and slow. On the second repeat the chord progression was exactly the same but we embellished the A chord slightly differently. On the A major chord on the second repeat we're not going to the double stop this time. We're playing the chord and then we're hammering on to the seventh fret of the G with our little finger. This turns the A into an A suspended four then we're playing the A chord once more. Then we've got a short lead run to finish on the G and D strings where we're doing a hammer-on pull off on the G and land in on the sixth fret of the D. So here's the pattern all the way through nice and slow. So you can use some of those chord ideas in your own riffs and your own playing to really spice up your progressions and give them a cool Hendricks edge. So here's that once more at full speed. All right so the fourth technique we're going to look at is some Eddie Van Halen style two-handed tapping so you can lose the pick for this one you don't need it. So for this technique I've dialed in a thick British style rock overdrive. Got the overdrive channel on the amp selected with the gain set to halfway. Got the ISF all the way to the British side, the bass on seven, the mid on eight and the travel on about six. I've also got a very very short one repeat slapback delay coming from a delay pedal on the floor and it sounds like this. That short slapback sound was used a lot on those early Van Halen records. You may have also noticed I've now switched to a humbucker guitar that's because I need a little bit more output for the style. So here's the technique in full and then we'll break it down. So while two-handed tapping may look very difficult it's not actually that hard to do. A great way to think about this is just like we're extending a pull-off. So all our left hand is doing is we're playing the second and fifth fret on the B string. We're doing it as a hammer-on so if we imagine we were just going the tap then acts as a wide pull-off so I'm actually tapping the ninth and tenth frets here I'm doing two bars of the ninth fret and two bars of the tenth fret. So what I'm doing is I'm hammering on like this with my tapping finger but this finger is already in position so when I actually lift the tapping finger it serves as a pull-off back to the two then after I've pulled off back to the two I'm then hammering on the fifth with my little finger and then repeating so I'm viewing this as triplets three per beat one and a two and a three and a four and a so the tap happens on the beat the second fret note happens on the end and the hammer on to the five happens on the ah one and ah so like I said we're doing two bars of that and then we're moving the tapping finger up to the tenth fret and repeating the same phrase. Once you get to grips with this technique and you get the coordination right between the hands you can actually start speeding it up pretty quickly. In terms of how you would use this in your own playing you're actually going to be targeting notes from the scale with your tapping hand so for instance in this example my fretting hand is playing notes from the F sharp minor or A major pentatonic scale so these two notes here are from that scale this note then I'm tapping here this note are both from the A major scale so if you're moving this around to different keys all you would do is target notes from that particular key so here's the tapping like nice and slow so like I said the really important thing there is the coordination between the two hands you've got to do this nice and slow to get those two hands talking to each other and then you can start pushing the speed once you start pushing the speed you can work it up to full speed just like this all right the fifth and final technique we're going to learn in this lesson is a Zach Wildstyle pinched harmonic this is a great way to add some squeal notes to your riffs so now we're going to be using quite a high gain tone I've got the gain up full and the ISF all the way to the bridge side I've got the bass on seven the mid on eight and the treble on nine I'm also using the bridge pickup of the guitar Zach Wild often uses active humbuckers so if you have access to active humbuckers that will get you even closer with these squeals but you can do the same job on passive ones you might just have to dig in a little bit harder so all of this example is based around this riff the pinch harmonics are going to be added at the end of each bar this is a real tricky technique to get used to so it does take a little bit of practice so to get a pinch harmonic you actually need to brush the string with your thumb just after you pick it this is quite a tricky technique to get used to so to get used to doing this technique you want to pick a note so I'm going to use the seventh fret of the D string this is slightly easier to do on the higher strings so what we're going to do is I'm going to pick that note continuously like this you want to hold the pick very very close to the edge so only a slight bit of the pick is protruding past your thumb and as you pick the string you want to brush the thumb against that string just after the pick moves and you get this harmonic sound that harmonic will change depending on where you pick so as you can hear there by moving the pick around I can get some different harmonics out so there's no set rule for exactly where I should apply this technique the technique really comes alive though when you pick it and get the harmonic with the pick in hand and you add a lot of vibrato with the fret in hand once you've gotten used to it on the highest strings then it's time to take it to the lower strings the low E string is a little bit more sensitive to doing pinch harmonics which is why the active humbuckers that Zach Wilde uses in his guitars really will help you want lots of gain for this and don't be afraid of dialing that treble up a little bit just to help the bite so we're adding the pinches on the third and fifth fret at the end of each bar so here's what it's going to be like nice and slow so you notice just as I'm doing those pinches on the third and fifth fret I'm adding a lot of vibrato and I'm actually picking them pretty hard so like I said you really want to dig in with a pick on those pinches and add a lot of vibrato so here's that riff once more at full speed so there you go there are five signature techniques from five classic guitar players you've had some Stevie Revon style rakes some David Gilmour style multi-step bends some Jimi Hendrix style chord breakups then we've had some Eddie Van Halen style tapping and to round up some Zach Wilde style pinch harmonics thank you all so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this video and I hope you've enjoyed this lesson please let us know down below in the comments what you thought and if you guys have been able to get some good use out of these techniques if there are any other techniques tips or tricks you want us to talk about please let us know please go check out black star amplification on youtube for more free lesson videos just like this and if you're looking for a guitar teacher in your local area please go check out mjomusic.com we've got a network of great teachers all over the UK just waiting to help you guys unlock your full potential thanks so much for watching and we'll see you soon