Rock licks and country licks: two boxes on one hand, and what makes them two musics

Two guitarists play in the same key over the same twelve bars and sound like two records. The rock player uses the minor pentatonic, the scale the sources say every rock player from Chuck Berry to Eric Clapton to Slash builds on [11]. The country player uses the major pentatonic, the scale country soloing is usually done in [13]. From the same root the two scales share two notes and differ by one fret on the other three [13]. The rest of the difference is in the hands, and it comes to six things.

• Three notes differ. Both scales have the root and the 5th, A and E. Rock's other three are the ♭3, the 4th and the ♭7 (C, D and G): the minor chord's 3rd and 7th, and the 4th between them. Country's are the 2nd, the 3rd and the 6th (B, C♯ and F♯): the major chord's 3rd, with the 2nd below it and the 6th above the 5th. Each rock note is a semitone above its country one, the ♭3 above the 2nd, the 4th above the 3rd, the ♭7 above the 6th [13].
• The note is held, or clipped. Rock sustains a note and shakes it [9] [10]; country pops it against the pickup and cuts it short, with dead notes between — chicken picking [1] [3].
• The bend is held, or released. Rock pushes the two-fret bend up and keeps it there [9]; country pushes it up and lets it back down, the way a pedal steel's pedal comes up [4] [5].
• The pairs are 4ths and 5ths, or 3rds and 6ths. And country bends one string of the pair while the other holds still [4] [5].
• The pull-offs stay in the box, or go to the open strings. Country's cascade to the open e and B strings comes from the banjo and the fiddle [6] [7].
• Each borrows one note from the blues. Rock takes the ♭5; country takes the ♭3 and hammers it into the 3rd [3].

The rock box is A minor pentatonic at the 5th fret and the country box is A major pentatonic at the 4th. Both have their root on the low E string at the 5th fret and on the top string at the 5th, and both have the 5th on the A string's 7th and the B string's 5th. Those five cells are the same in both boxes.

The rock box adds the ♭3, the 4th and the ♭7 on frets 5 to 8. The country box adds the 2nd, the 3rd and the 6th on frets 4 to 7. The country box is the brighter and sweeter sound, the sources say, and the minor box the darker one [13]. A hand that knows one box knows most of the other, since three of the four frets are shared.

The ♭3, the 4th and the ♭7 are each one fret above the 2nd, the 3rd and the 6th on the same string. On the top string the ♭3 is the 8th fret and the 2nd is the 7th. On the B string the ♭7 is the 8th and the 6th is the 7th. On the G string the 4th is the 7th and the 3rd is the 6th, and the ♭3 is the 5th and the 2nd is the 4th. The figure shows all seven pairs.

The two cards below are one four-bar phrase written once. The rock card plays it with the rock notes and the country card plays it with each of those notes moved down a fret on its own string. The rhythm, the strings and the shared notes are identical, and a test holds that they are.

The rock band plays a straight backbeat and the Bakersfield band plays a crisp two. The rock band's kick plays one, the "and" of two and three, the snare plays two and four, and the bass stays on the root; the rhythm guitar plays the chord on one and leaves air between the chords [14]. The Bakersfield band's kick plays one and three, the snare plays two and four sharp, and the bass walks root, 3rd, 5th and 6th into every change, with a Telecaster playing double stops and popped notes through slapback [14].

Both bands are straight and both are in A. That is why this course's control card in lesson 8 comes out the way it does: the band matters less here than it did between the blues and rock and roll, and the notes and the hands carry more.

A rock note lasts and a country note stops. The rock player holds a note for half a bar or a whole one and shakes it from the wrist once it has settled; the sources describe the vibrato as slow and shallow or fast and wide, and Clapton's as coming from the whole hand with the thumb off the neck [9] [10]. Sustain is the rock sound, and it is why the amp is loud.

The country player cuts every note after a sixteenth and puts a dead note between the melody notes [3]. The mechanics matter:

• The pop is the melody note snapped against the pickup by a finger under the pick [1] [2].
• The dead note is the fret hand's. The finger stays on the cell and lifts its pressure, so the next stroke is a pitchless cluck on the same string. The heel of the picking hand stays off: a palm cannot plant and lift once a sixteenth, and no source asks it to.
• The other classic form splits the job across two strings: an open string plucked by the middle finger as a pedal, the pick walking a line on the string below it. The alternation is between hands and strings, never between the pop and the heel on one string.

James Burton named it and Don Rich played it on a Telecaster through slapback [2] [14]. The two cards below play their own boxes' notes, held on one side and popped with clucks on the other.

Both musics bend a whole step, and do opposite things with it. The two-fret bend is almost universal, the sources say, pushed up on the treble strings and pulled down on the bass strings [9]. Rock pushes the ♭7 to the root or the 4th to the 5th, holds the bend for half a bar and shakes it.

Country pushes the 2nd to the 3rd or the 5th to the 6th and lets it straight back down inside the beat. That is what a pedal steel does when a pedal goes down and comes back up, and the guitar copies it [4] [5]. The country bend is also pre-bent: the string is pushed up before the pick and released after it. On one string this lesson compares only the bend; the steel bend with a second string held still is two notes at once, and it is in the next lesson.

Rock plays two notes with no 3rd between them and country plays two notes with a 3rd in them. The rock pairs are the root and 5th on the low strings and 4ths on the top strings, and the unison bend, where the ♭7 is bent to the root while the root rings on the next string. They are hollow, and they sit under distortion.

The country pairs are 3rds and 6ths, the harmony a pedal steel plays, and the steel bend: one note of the pair is pushed a whole step while the other holds still. The sources call bending one note of a chord while the others stay stationary the signature sound of the pedal steel, and warn that the still notes must not go along for the ride [4] [5]. The 5th bent to the 6th under a held root is the one the sources spell out [5]; the 2nd bent to the 3rd under a held 5th is the other.

Rock pulls off between fretted notes and country pulls off to the open strings. The rock pull-off from the 8th fret to the 5th and the hammer-on from the 5th to the 7th stay inside the box, so the lick works in any key at any fret.

The country cascade pulls fretted notes off to the open e and B strings and lets them ring over the fretted ones. The sources describe Albert Lee weaving open strings into runs, the cascading effect of replacing fretted notes with open ones in Brent Mason's style, and the debt to rolling banjos and fiddles [6] [7] [8]. It only exists in the keys whose notes are open strings — A, E, D and G — and the same lick a fret up, in B♭, cannot be played.

Each music borrows one note from the blues and uses it its own way. Rock borrows the ♭5, the blue note of the minor pentatonic, and passes through it between the 4th and the 5th, never holding it.

Country borrows the ♭3, the note one fret below its 3rd, and hammers it into the 3rd every time; it never lands on it. The country box with the ♭3 added is the major blues scale, and the ♭3 hammered onto the 3rd is a lick country shares with rock and roll [3] [13]. Rock holds the ♭3 as a home note; country passes through it. That is the same note doing two jobs, and it is the last difference the course lists.

Each chorus is twelve bars made of two bars from every lesson. The order is set by the chord under each pair of bars: the pairs go over the IV, where the country pairs have no 3rd in them, since the 3rd of A is the major 7th of D; the borrowed note goes over the I; the pull-offs go over the V and the IV; the bends come home over the I.

The third card is the control. It is the country chorus, note for note, over the rock band at the rock tempo, and it is still country. The band matters less between these two musics than it did between the blues and rock and roll, because both bands here are straight; the notes and the hands carry it. After it, the app's own part for each feel with the fill bars left to you.