Stealing licks is a great way to practice

[Robert****]

Do you do this? Steal licks from other players? Well if not, you'd better start doing it! Stealing is really the wrong word. I call it borrowing. I borrow from many players, from horn and piano players to guitarists and banjo players.

Take few notes off a solo, a few interesting chords, a bend here or a hammer-on there. Learn it well and try altering it a bit, perhaps by playing it with different timing or phrasing, or perhaps change, add or remove a few notes here and there. Pretty soon you have your own cool licks and ideas!

The more you do this, the larger your musical vocabulary will be and the more you will develop your own sound.

The one thing that I learned the most from in my whole guitar-playing life is stealing or borrowing from other players. Nothing else comes even close.

[oldguy]

Yeah, I've been doing that with your lesson licks ever since I got here.
No, seriously, that's the way we grew up around this part of the country, showing each other things as we learned. Some learned from books, scales, etc.
Others learned by listening.......to banjo, fiddle, piano,etc.
Then we shared.
BTW, I just put a vid up in the member's clips section with some of the licks I stole off you, Robert.: Well, borrowed, really.

[Algonquin]

I practiced the opening riff to 'message in a bottle' when I started getting back into guitar a couple of years ago a lot. It's a great stretch exercise which I've heard him (Andy Summers) describe as 'parallel fifth's'. He used the same pattern in a lot of his playing, and you can hear the same pattern in 'Every breath you take'

A while ago I was working on a little piece of my own and I found that using the parallel fifths I'd learned from him worked great into my piece as a forward progression to bridge two parts together.

The other day I was learning to play a Kim Mitchell tune (Rock and Roll Duty) and discovered that he used the same parallel fifths I'd learned from the Police tunes.

I don't think it's stealing, it's more about learning from multiple resources and hopefully coming up with your or sound or vibe.

[Robert****]

You can call it what you will - I call it learning the guitar!

(could be the words to a blues tune, eh? )

[BluesHowler]

One of my favorite guitar players, Jimmy Page "stole" and ,or "borrowed" almost every lick he played.

Led Zeppelin was a blues based band and Jimmy based his licks on a lot of blues players licks that came before him.

Check out this Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Lotta_Love

[Spudman***]

That is precisely what I did to get started.
I was just learning to play back in the mid 1970s and a friend gave me a Guitar Player magazine and Richie Blackmore said 'steal everything you can and make it your own." I never forgot that. So that's what I did. I stole a lot of really cool licks and now play them real crappy thereby making them my own.

[Jimi75]

I wonder where I would be without "stealing" licks. It really is a great thing to do, especially signature licks and chords. When you automatically start altering them after you played them lots of times it's a great feeling.