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Want to Knock 'em Dead in Nashville?
Learn These 20 Tasty Country
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Licks
5644238%3B495597%3BPosted 07/06/2016 by Gary Potter , photo by Rick Kern/Getty Images
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Exploring the world of country guitar is a diverse and exciting journey, one from which a guitarist of any background can benefit, while having fun.
Modern country guitar is an amalgam of traditional and not-so-traditional playing approaches borrowed from several related homegrown American
styles. As such, it includes elements of blues, bluegrass, rock and roll, and even jazz, and it oers a tasty mix of expressive and challenging playing
techniques.

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The key musical building blocks that form country guitars foundational
vocabulary are the major and minor pentatonic scales, the major scale and
the Mixolydian mode, major and minor chords and their corresponding
arpeggios, dominant sevenths and ninths, and the judicious use of
chromatic passing tones.
Mainstay country guitar-playing techniques include flatpicking,
fingerpicking and hybrid picking (pick-and-fingers technique); the
exploitation of open strings and licks played in the open position, which
have a characteristic twangy tone; and lots of string bends and finger
slides.
The go-to ax for most country pickers is a solidbody electric guitar,
particularly a Telecaster-style design, equipped with single-coil pickups and
fairly light-gauge strings (.009s or .010s). More-traditional country

guitarists, such as the legendary Chet Atkins, came of age playing a semi-hollowbody guitar equipped with humbuckers, and country-rock players, like

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guitarists, such as the legendary Chet Atkins, came of age playing a semi-hollowbody guitar equipped with humbuckers, and country-rock players, like
the Kentucky Headhunters Greg Martin, prefer Gibson-style, humbucker-equipped solidbodies.
Classic American-style tube amps, such as vintage Fenders, are the rig of choice for many country guitarists. Most players eschew the use of high-tech,
COhonest-sounding
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