In Creating Bluegrass and Roots Music Solos, so far, you’ve had sessions on major scales, pentatonic scales, and blues scales. In this session, Scott talks about using arpeggios in your soloing, in particular as the basis for “place holder licks”: things you play when you want to pause for a bit in your solo. Usually, you’ll use place-holder licks when you get to long, sustained melody notes, which are often the “target notes” in a melody. By combining the phrases you’ve worked on to lead into target notes with place-holder licks, you begin to create more complete solos. Scott uses the folk standard “Banks of the Ohio” to show you a variety of guitar-oriented, place-holder licks, and (using a Django Reinhardt solo as an example), shows you how to use arpeggios to fill in spaces in an improvisation or composed solo on “Wayfaring Stranger.”
The musical handouts (downloadable PDFs) for the session (and all sessions) are available in three formats: notation with guitar tab, notation with mandolin tab, and notation only.
