While looking through YouTube to find some lessons on country guitar, I came across an old video from Scotty Anderson: his Hot Licks video, “Red Hot Guitar.”

 

It was obvious that he could play the hell out of the guitar, but I had no idea just how much. A good friend of mine mentioned something about how fast Anderson plays double stops. I hadn’t noticed what my friend was talking about, so I decided to watch the video again.

 

After I saw Anderson explain his double stop technique, I was left in disbelief. Basically, he was using his thumb pick and the nail of his index finger to play two notes on adjacent strings. One of Anderson’s albums is called Triple Stop. I don’t know how my brain would handle it if I knew for sure that we could also do triple stops with his technique.

 

Since seeing Anderson’s video, I have grown my right hand nails back out. I had grown them to play classical guitar while at the Atlanta Institute of Music, but I cut them shortly after graduating. Having nails and playing country guitar seems counter intuitive.

 

When I think of country, I picture cheating hearts, beer, bars, trucks, farming and mama. That doesn’t seem to go hand-in-hand with having long nails, but it seems that a lot of my country guitar heroes like Scotty Anderson, Brent Mason, Johnny Hiland, and Jerry Donahue do have long nails on their right hand. Another of my favorite country guitar players is Brad Paisley. I am not sure if he has long nails on his right hand or not.

 

I have worked from time to time on Anderson’s double stop technique, but I haven’t gotten very far with it. I did recently start to see a pattern with one of his licks:

 

 

All the highlighted numbers are chord tones in the E7 chord. So, he is basically playing a chord tone with a scale tone the entire time. The only scale tone he omitted was the sharp fifth.  All other tones are there at some point.

 

Now, some of the theory behind the madness is making sense. The next step is playing it smoothly.