by Brad Carlton

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In this 4-part video guitar lesson series, Brad Carlton explores 40 timeless tips from 40 guitar legends featured in Guitar Player Magazine. Each lesson explores a lick or an exercise in the style of a great guitarist complete with the video guitar lesson, power tab, chart, and more. Now dig in and supercharge your chops!

1. Johnny Winter

In this issue Southern rock/blues legend Johnny Winter recalled that when he was an up-and-coming guitarist, you weren’t cool unless you could play “Yankee Doodle” and “Dixie” at the same time. “Luther Naley showed me how to do it,” said Winter, “but I never really got it down.” To help you get it down, GP contributor Eric Park provided a complete arrangement for readers who would dare the fretboard feat. Comprising the distinctive opening phrases of each melody (“Yankee” on the low strings, “Dixie” on the high ones), this example details how to go double-duty on these ditties.

Click here to get the chart and tab for this guitar lesson.

2. Steve Morse

If Steve Morse isn’t the scariest chops-meister on the planet, he’s in the top two. This beautiful series of arpeggios is actually a couple of lessons in one. It’s an alternate-picking workout and a fingerstyle boot camp (depending on how you choose to practice it). You can play through the whole exercise or you can grab two beats at a time for cool little motifs to work into a solo.

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3. Howard Roberts

Guitar cliches, as Musicians Institute co-founder and GP columnist extraordinaire Howard Roberts put it, come from “habitual muscular responses triggered by familiar playing situations.” One of Roberts’ signature cliche-killing teaching techniques was to get players of all skill levels to break out of the typical chord and scale patterns ingrained in their fingers-and the corresponding sounds imprinted in their ears-by experimenting with sonic shapes. Strum each shape (and its mirror image, as shown) as a chord, or arpeggiate it note-by-note. Mix, match, and make up your own. No matter how you play ’em, sonic shapes yield fresh, atonal, and unpredictable sounds.

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4. Craig Hlady

The easiest way to create wild sounds using an ordinary riff or scale is to shift one or more of its notes up (or down) an octave-an approach that is simple in concept but tricky to execute on the fly. “Eric Johnson, John Scofield, Pat Martino, and Jim Hall all use octave displacement to create wide intervals in their solos,” wrote Craig Hlady in this lesson.” The first bar shows an ordinary eight-note C-to-C major scale. See how it is transformed by octave displacement in the two phrases that follow.

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5. Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell has always sung like an angel, but she’s a perpetual rogue when it comes to guitar tunings. Take inspiration from her and yank those tuning machines in any direction that serves the song. For example, the riff below (in the style of Mitchell’s “Coyote”) is made easy to play by a mutant C11 tuning-which, from standard, is achieved by lowering the sixth string to C, the fifth to G, and the third to F; and raising the second to C.

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6. Jim Campilongo

“As I’m drawn to ringing dissonances, blues notes, and passing tones, I try to incorporate open strings in a melody whenever possible,” wrote cowboy jazz iconoclast Jim Campilongo this fine year. “Against a moving line, sustaining open strings can create an eerie, beautiful effect. The behind-the-nut bends [bars 4 and 5] sound like pedal steel. They’re most comfortable on Fender-style headstocks. For better leverage, press about an inch behind the nut with your fretting hand’s 1st finger.”

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7. Nuno Bettencourt

Anyone can hit harmonics on the 12th fret but there are a ton of cool chimes to be found on other frets. Here funk-rocker Nuno Bettencourt details a two-bar harmonic riff that’s pretty and spooky at the same time. Drop your low-E string down to D and pick closer to the bridge to make the harmonics really jump out. Bonus! If you don’t detune your low string and just follow the tab you’ll have some harmonics that are truly disturbing!

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8. Paul Gilbert

Shred guitar can sound stale and, well, inbred when the player’s only influences are other shredders. On the other hand, Paul Gilbert-the genre’s MVP (most versatile player)-has a bright, colorful style that was forged by listening not just to a wide range of guitarists, but also to a wide range of instruments. “I picked out keyboard patterns from Utopia and Boston records,” said Gilbert, before playing these two flourishes. “A lot of my two-note-per-string fingerings came out of learning keyboard sequences like these.”

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9. The Hellcasters

You can’t have too many cool bending or sliding techniques, so why not combine them into one slinky run? In an effort to simulate pedal-steel licks on guitar, madman Will Ray “shows you how to release pre-bends into downward slides-a neat trick.”

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10. Jerry Hahn

Penning over 50 lessons, Jerry Hahn was one of GP’s most prolific columnists. His pieces were great because they rarely if ever featured exercises that merely improved a guitarist’s physical technique. Hahns’s examples always improved a player’s overall musicality as well. For instance, ask yourself: Are these three knuckle-busting stretching exercises merely fretboard calisthenics, or do they also demonstrate sly ways of affecting smooth key modulations via stepwise voice-leading? (Tip: If the stretches are too brutal, move the exercise higher up the neck.)

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