Interestingly, country guitarists tend to approach soloing in a way similar to jazz musicians, often crafting licks that either melodically describe the underlying chord changes via arpeggio-based ideas or emphasize chord tones. Most players eschew the use of high-tech, high-gain amps or psychedelic effects and opt instead for a more “honest”-sounding bright-clean and/or “organically” overdriven tone with some spring reverb and compression. More-traditional country guitarists, such as the legendary Chet Atkins, came of age playing a semi-hollowbody guitar equipped with humbuckers, and country-rock players, like the Kentucky Headhunters’ Greg Martin, prefer Gibson-style, humbucker-equipped solidbodies.Ĭlassic American-style tube amps, such as vintage Fenders, are the rig of choice for many country guitarists. The go-to ax for most country pickers is a solidbody electric guitar, particularly a Telecaster-style design, equipped with single-coil pickups and fairly light-gauge strings (.009s or. Mainstay country guitar-playing techniques include flatpicking, fingerpicking and hybrid picking (pick-and-fingers technique) the exploitation of open strings and licks played in the “open position,” which have a characteristic “twangy” tone and lots of string bends and finger slides. The key musical building blocks that form country guitar’s foundational vocabulary are the major and minor pentatonic scales, the major scale and the Mixolydian mode, major and minor chords and their corresponding arpeggios, dominant sevenths and ninths, and the judicious use of chromatic passing tones. As such, it includes elements of blues, bluegrass, rock and roll, and even jazz, and it offers a tasty mix of expressive and challenging playing techniques. Modern country guitar is an amalgam of traditional and not-so-traditional playing approaches borrowed from several related homegrown American styles.