Rob Schumann

Turnaround Licks

This is an example of using a lick from an unrelated style to come up with your own material. In this case I was creating a lick to use over a blues turnaround. A turnaround in a 12 bar blues is where the chord progression goes from the V chord to the IV chord and back to I.

For this example, I adapted the lick at the end of solo in Metallica's Enter Sandman. It's a cool phrase because it uses rhythmic displacement: superimposing a three-note pattern into a four-note subdivision. In this case, you get a 3-3-2 feel every two beats. Here's the original Metallica lick:

 

Next, I took that pattern and changed the notes to follow the arpeggios of the V and IV chords in a 12 bar blues in A. My target notes for the E7 chord are: E, G#, B, D. My target notes for the D7 chord are: D, F#, A, and C. Notice that since the chords are a whole step (2 frets) apart, the lick is essentially the same thing, descending two frets.

 

The one thing I didn't like about the lick was that it sounded too predictable: the chords went down and the lick went down. So I decided to make the second lick go up. From the first arpeggio, I found that by going to the next fret, I could play the nore C out of the D7 chord, and then by altering the fingering slightly, I could play the notes C, A and F# out of the arpeggio. Now it sounds much cooler:

 

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