Lost your password?

by Rich Maloof

If you suffer from gear acquisition syndrome, and we know you do, it’s likely that you find yourself in a guitar shop on a regular basis. Perhaps too regular a basis. Perhaps way too regular given your time, your budget, and society’s expectation that you will interact with the other humans.

But there you are, pulling another guitar off the wall (say, this one has an f-hole!) and exploring whether it gives you the feelies.

We hope the experience never grows old. But what we’re wondering right now is this: What is the first thing you play when an unfamiliar guitar in the store is pulled down and plugged in?

An informal and completely unscientific poll that wasn’t really even conducted shows that most of us players tend to play the same lick whenever we pick up a new guitar. Maybe it’s what we think sounds great. Maybe it is just too cool to keep to ourselves. Maybe we have a need to impress salespeople. Maybe it’s an acid test — a lick so comfortable with that only a dog of a guitar would make it feel bad.

We asked three TrueFire pros — Jeff Scheetz, Joe Dalton and Matt Brandt — to reveal their Guitar Store Licks, and they were kind enough to indulge the request. Here’s what they shared. They even provided a video guitar lesson walk-through for Punch-In readers looking to expand their own guitar-store repertoire.

Let us know what you think and then answer our question with a comment or your own short video: What is YOUR Guitar Store lick?

1. Jeff likes to frighten parents and small children:

2. Matt checking out acoustics with a sweet fingerstyle progression:

3. Joe’s twang twyout:

4. Joe’s retro triplestops, to get a sense of the pickups:

5. Joe also likes to try a little something jazzy: