Guitar Licks by Kirk Lorange
(The Licks à Lorange series)
All Guitar Licks by Kirk Lorange
![]() |
A Lick with a Neat Little Bend This lick has got that neat little bend in it. I've been exploring bends recently and I thought I'd pass this on to you in this lesson. There are so many ways of incorporating bends into licks but this is my favourite. |
![]() |
A Melodic Blues Lick This is a fairly long melodic lick in Am. I can't quite remember how or when I came up with it but once it locked itself into the brain cells and finger muscles, I found myself playing it often. I just like the way it sounds and the way it feels under the finger tips. |
![]() |
An Easy Blues Lick The only thing you might need to work on in this is the bend. It’s just a semitone bend, though, so you shouldn’t have much trouble. |
![]() |
A Jazzy Blues Lick This one launches from and resolves to the 1, the tonic, the root, the strongest tone of all. It's definitely another fun one to play. |
![]() |
A Mean Blues Lick This one has a really nice, bluesy dissonant sound to it, at least the opening bit, and it resolves nicely and it's moveable up and down the fretboard, which is always a bonus. |
![]() |
A Blues lick in E à la Jimi Hendrix. This one is pretty easy to execute, you just need to let those fingers dance. Like all good, strong lines, it’s based around chord tones. |
![]() |
A Harmonized Blues Lick using Double Stops This one uses double stops. It's pretty straight forward and a great example of a ‘chord-tone’ lick. |
![]() |
Another Harmonized Blues Lick using Double Stops This one that becomes a sort of rhythm part when repeated. It’s a moveable lick too, which is always nice. |
![]() |
A Fun Blues Lick in E This one uses a couple open strings making it only playable in E, but it is those open strings that make this one fun to play and gives it that distinctive sound. The other thing about using open strings in the middle of lines is that it gives you time to do big moves like I do in this one. |
![]() |
A Moveable Blues Lick that rolls right off the fingertips This is not only moveable but has all kinds of detail: pull-offs, hammer-ons, slide-ups. It looks and sounds complex when you first hear it, but it’s not. It’s just another lick that needs to be worked out, run through slowly and brought up to speed once you’re sure you have it right. |
![]() |
A Country Slide Lick in Dropped D Tuning. This one is in Dropped D Tuning, so the first thing to do is lower that bass string down a whole tone from E to D. Second thing to do is grab your slide and slip it over the pinkie. This lick has a country ‘chicken pickin’ vibe to it, a fun one to play as it’s a blend of normal playing and slide playing. |
![]() |
A Slide Lick This particular lick is probably way to complex if you've never tried slide before, but you can take any small element of it and work on that for a while, even if it's just getting one slide note sounding good it'll be worthwhile. |
As well as putting together these guitar licks, I am also the author of PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Package, which teaches a mindset, a way of thinking about music and a way of tracking it all on the guitar fretboard. Yes, there IS a constant down there in the maze of strings and fret wire, a landmark that points to everything at all times. I call it The Easiest Yet Most Powerful Guitar Lesson You Will Ever Learn and many testimonials at my site will back up that rather superlative description. If your goal as a guitar player is to be able to truly PLAY the guitar, not just learn by rote; to be able to invent on the fly, not memorize every note; to be able to see the WHOLE fretboard as friendly, familiar territory, not just the first 5 frets and to do it all without thinking about all those scales and modes, then you should read more here.