There’s a circa-1968 interview video clip with Eric Clapton in which he reveals a great deal about his guitar style.
Sitting in front of a wall of miscellaneous amps, and cradling his legendary 1964 “Fool” Gibson SG (the one with the psychedelic paint job), Clapton says something about himself that’s true of every player, whether they admit it or not.
“Yeah, there are phrases that I always play, stock phrases that I work from,” he says.
He illustrates the point saying by slowly picking out a few tart pentatonic lines, then comments, “All these runs are put together from old phrases that I first started on, and now they’re just all mixed up with other things I learned.”
Like so many of us, Clapton started out as an imitator. He devoted years of practice and study to assimilate the sound and spirit of the bluesmen he idolized. And by taking these “old phrases,” treating them to subtle variations and combining them in new ways, he eventually became, arguably, the greatest Chicago blues player to come from somewhere other than Chicago.
From there, he went on to define what we now know as rock lead guitar, but he didn’t do that by altering the way he played. Instead, he just picked different musical backdrops for his electric blues excursions. In truth, Clapton’s approach to the guitar has hardly changed since the beginning of his career. Many of his favorite licks back in the Sixties remain his favorite licks today.
Here, we present 10 examples of those licks to absorb and apply in your own style.
Clapton had already gone a long way toward mastering the blues by the time he joined the Yardbirds in 1963. FIGURE 1, similar to a