Fans will often stop me after a show and ask how I go about playing a guitar solo. I am honored that you ask and always happy to share my thoughts with you! As you can probably tell, I love to pull elements from different genres and incorporate techniques from a variety of musical styles into my particular brand of blues rock soloing.
One example of a solo with a clean, kind of Americana approach, that closes out with a spicy little chicken pickin riff, is found in my solo on Nothin' Blues The Blues which I recorded on our Fire It Up! CD. Below is live video footage of this solo from our performance at the 2010 Coloma Blues Live festival:
Guitar Solo with Spicy Chicken Pickin
Chicken pickin is one of my very favorite techniques. I love to pull it out of my bag of guitar solo tricks and throw it in at various places to add sizzle to my filling and soloing. Sometimes it may be a fairly long run that lasts several measures, as in the ending riff in the above solo from Nothin' But The Blues, but often it is just a yummy little tidbit I will toss in when I want a quick and tasty transitional phrase. In this same solo, you can hear a little shot of chicken pickin in bar four - when we first go to the IV chord (C chord).
