Modern Country Masterclass

INTRODUCTION

Hi there, and welcome to my Modern Country Guitar Masterclass!

The purpose of this masterclass is to help you work on a range of techniques and soloing vocabulary, in the styles you can hear in commercial country music from the 1990s onward. To do this, I’m going to take you through a wide range of technique exercises, and then we’ll build up to a full country rock track with lots of diverse guitar solos.

MODERN COUNTRY MUSIC

The 1990s saw a more rocky sound influencing country music with massively popular stars like Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Brooks and Dunn, Tim McGraw and Shania Twain. Into the 2000s, Trace Adkins, Big And Rich and Jason Aldean brought a heavier rock element to the genre.

My country guitar studies began with the amazing Albert Lee and Jerry Donahue, but when I started listening to more recent commercial country music, I realised that a lot of these songs featured the incredible talents of session guitarists Brent Mason and Dan Huff, so I immersed myself in their playing and eventually joined my first pro country band in the 90s.

The more I investigated, the more players I found. Vince Gill and Keith Urban were singing and playing incredible guitar on their own albums, and when the amazing Brad Paisley broke onto the scene, another ‘chapter’ in great country guitar playing had started! Younger session guitarists like J.T. Corenflos, James Mitchell and Adam Shoenfeld are now taking the music forward. And of course, we can still learn from the legends: James Burton, Albert Lee, Jerry Donohue, Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed, all of whom have influenced my own country guitar playing style.

The track contains many of the techniques that are synonymous with country guitar playing, like hybrid picking, string bending, open string runs, chicken picking, 3rds/6ths, double stops and pentatonic scale ideas, and there is a large technical exercises section here, with over 60 exercises to help you develop these techniques in order to help you to not only play the track, but also to help generally improve your country guitar playing techniques, and give you some ideas that you can use if you want to improvise over the backing track too.

THE EXERCISES

I’ve grouped the exercises into seven themes, mostly focusing on a single technique. Two of these themes, “Thirds and Sixths” and “Pentatonics” are partly about theory, but I’ve included them here as they have an impact on your technique.

Take your time with all the exercises. They’re designed to work with a wide variety of tempos, so start slowly to ensure accuracy, but also try playing them fast as soon as you can. Some exercises are easier at fast tempos and have a totally different “feel” at slower tempos.