Country guitar

The guitar tradition of country music, characterised by hybrid picking, double stops, bends and a bright, clean, twangy tone.

Country playing combines fingerstyle and flatpicking in a single technique, using the pick for the bass strings and the fingers for snaps on the higher strings, which is what gives the style its percussive clarity. Its vocabulary is full of open-string pedal tones, sixths and thirds moved in parallel, and bends executed with a lighter touch than in blues. Tone tends towards the bright and clean, with a compressor and a touch of slapback delay, because the parts have to be heard above a dense arrangement.

Example: A solo mixing picked low notes with snapped finger notes, using parallel sixths and a bright clean tone, is country playing.

Country guitar

See also