# Jazz up your country licks



## dolphinstreet (Sep 11, 2006)

Country players often sneak in some jazz influences, especially in faster tunes. Have you noticed? It’s a way to make it sound a bit more sophisticated, and and perhaps an excuse to play more notes! Haha!

Here I’m showing you a way you can approach this. The scale/mode I’m using over this is G Mixolydian. The track is basically a G chord groove. I then make sure I play a chord tone on a downbeat. These downbeats are mostly approached from a half-step away. You can add chromatic passing notes before and after that chord tone. Listen to the first 5 notes of this lick. They are chromatic, and the 5th note is a chord tone. Pretty cool?


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## Distortion (Sep 16, 2015)

Darn the exact area I don't play G major .


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## Dorian2 (Jun 9, 2015)

Distortion said:


> Darn the exact area I don't play G major .


All the more reason to learn the lick! Once you get that particular position/shape down, you'll keep returning to it quite a bit. In many keys. It's a goodun.

Great lesson Robert.


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## dolphinstreet (Sep 11, 2006)

I think of this style of playing as "chord tones + "some extra notes to tie it all together"... if that makes sense. You have a scale, you figure out the arpeggios, play those chord tones, and you add some chromatic passing notes, or sometimes just one note a half-step away from each chord tone, and voila. Keep the chord tones on downbeats as a general rule.


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