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To review, theLast month, I introduced the concept[1] of bringing the country guitar technique known as chicken pickin’ into metal music and metal-style solos.
To review, the technique is performed using hybrid picking, as notes are alternately sounded with the downstroke of the pick followed by an upstroke with a fingertip (typically the middle finger). The fingerpicked upstroke serves to snap the string against the fretboard, and this aggressive, “cluck”-type sound is the reason this technique is often referred to as chicken pickin’.
I presented the technique last month by playing phrases that moved across pairs of adjacent strings, from high to low, starting with a picked downstroke on the lower of the two strings, followed by a fingerpicked upstroke on the higher of the two strings. We’ll now delve deeper into other neat things you can do with chicken pickin’.
I am fascinated with the idea of applying syncopated, drum-like figures to the guitar, and I have found that using chicken pickin’ is a great way to recreate those sounds in a melodic way. One such syncopation is that of two 16th notes followed by a 16th-note triplet, played repeatedly on the downbeat of each quarter note across multiple bars.
FIGURE 1 illustrates this pattern performed on the top two strings, starting with a pick stroke on the B string followed by a fingerpick on the high E string, after which the two techniques alternate throughout the remainder of the figure. Notice that the 16th-note triplet is achieved via a quick hammer/pull between two notes on the high E string.
The next step is to move this concept across every pair of strings in a descending manner, as demonstrated in FIGURE 2: at the culmination of executing the initial pattern on the top