Look Who it Was Random video

Funk lead guitar tips

2,446 views · Published 7 October 2015 · 11:12 · Indexed 25 October 2026

Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher · 2015 · Music

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Here's the video transcript:

How can you take a blues-based lead guitar style like this...and turn it into something funky like this...Well in this short lesson we'll try and pinpoint some of the basic tricks behind this style of lead playing. Let's start with this little exercise.

I call this: 'muted, single string, 16 beat picking' and it really is the basic rhythmic technique behind funk lead guitar playing. Let's break it down. The muting is done by the fretting hand, which I just lightly lay across the strings here, say between the fifth and seventh frets, like this . And this completely damps out the sound of the strings. 

Now let's home in on the fourth string and get a sixteen-beats-to-the-bar picking pattern going. Not everyone finds this easy to understand or to do, so let's break this down too. Start by playing four down-strokes to the bar, quite slowly like this.  counting 1 2 3 4 ...1 2 3 4... Now fill in the gaps in between these four main beats with extra down-strokes like this.  and count these as 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & ... 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & ...

This gives us a nice eight-beat pattern typical of some rock guitar styles, but to get funky we need to double this by adding in upstrokes like this...Starting with four  1 2 3 4 then doubling to eight  1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &-  still all down strokes at this stage. Then doubling again to sixteen beats-to-the-bar by adding up strokes.  and we count this as: 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a ...and so on.  Notice that among these sixteen notes to the bar there is still a basic pulse of four to the bar...you can think of it as four lots of four if you like ...1234 2234 3234 4234, but I find it easier to say 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a!

OK so that's stage one. But before we go any further I just want you to take a close look at how you are holding the pick for this. We want the pick hardly extending at all from the finger tip for this, so that we can get a very hard-edged sound like this . Hitting the string at high velocity without losing control of the pick.

OK, once you are comfortable with the muted, single string, 16 beat picking exercise, move on and take the muting effect off the notes on beats one and two. Notice that the movement of the hand is fairly minimal - I just stab the string against the fret wire at the fifth fret here and at the same time raise the other fingers momentarily to unmute the sound completely. Then cut it off again by allowing the muting fingers back on.
 
At the picking hand end, you will accelerate the pick through the string on these first two beats, but otherwise the trick is to keep the 16 beat pattern going. 

Once you have settled into this, try unmuting a couple of upstrokes in each bar to make a pattern something like this. Here's the pattern in slow motion 

This is almost impossible to do deliberately, by counting the beats or whatever - it's better to just get the idea of the rhythm in your head  ...and then go for it . Then, as you gain confidence, start experimenting with different variations - there are hundreds of ways you can pick different rhythms out of the basic 16 beat pattern simply by unmuting some of the notes.

Next step is to add this hammer-on on the first beat of each bar. Notice now that although we start our funky riff on the G note at fret 5 on the fourth string, we are playing the rest of the bar an the A note at fret 7. 

As a final step for this lesson let's add a note from the third string at fret 5 using a bit of bending and plenty of vibrato like this. Using this as a point of departure we can then gradually add in other bits of our blues scale in A and build all sorts of ideas maybe something like this. 

As always, I am going to recommend hours of experimentation and exploration of these ideas to really get on top of this great style of playing. But I'm hoping that the ideas covered here will get you started.

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