Greetings guitar slingers!
Welcome to this look back at the previous tutorial. We will use the TT-Zop tutorial as a starting point to head on into some Country guitar playing, so if you haven't checked out the previous tutorial, please do so here.
Once you have refreshed your memory of this shuffle/bluesrock tutorial, it's time to head on into Yihaa-heaven! One of the main components of country playing is the straight sixteen note feel. As commonplace as shuffle is in texas-style blues and rock, just as common place is the straight sixteen note feel in Country. This together with that spanking clean (most often) Telecaster tone are one of the things that gets us thinking of country. A slapback delay will also help fill out the guitar sound (as you can hear in the examples).
Another is the use of the major pentatonic scale, as opposed to the minor.
In the video I talk about the right hand/left hand importance. When I say that the right hand is not really important, it is important to understand that i do NOT mean it is not important to practise right hand technique. What I mean is rather that when you have a sufficient level of right hand technique, it will be automatic in the sense that you won't have to think about it. At that time, whatever you decide to play with your left hand, your right hand will follow without concious thought. I you for example wish to accentuate a certain note in a line, your right hand will automatically hit that note harder. But it's a given that you DO need to practise a lot before you achieve this level of right hand-freedom!
This tutorial is in no way intended to cover all the bases of Country guitar, but will serve to give you a starting point from which to expand your guitar playing into this genre. This is also why I have chosen to use the (perhaps) more familiar terrain of rock/shuffle as a stepping stone. I will not cover country techniques such as double stop bending in this tutorial either, since that is such a big topic it really deseves a tutorial all for itself. This tutorial will focus mainly on rhythm/lick combinations, to help you get started.