The pentatonic scale is the friend who shows up to every jam, plays reliably, and puts absolutely everyone to sleep by bar four. We all live in that little box, we all know it does box things, and we all sound like each other doing it. Tragic, really, for something with only five notes.
So here's Lick #56: a short string skipping pentatonic lick that takes those exact same five notes and yeets them across non-adjacent strings. Same scale, wildly different attitude — suddenly your line has leaps, air, and the faint smell of someone who practices.
How the string skipping trick actually works
Inside a pentatonic box you normally move from string to neighbouring string, which hands you nice, polite intervals — seconds, thirds, the harmonic equivalent of small talk. String skipping means you deliberately hop over the middle string to grab the note on the far side. That turns those cosy little steps into sixths and sevenths, and wide intervals are the single fastest way to make a scale stop sounding like a scale.
The concrete takeaway: keep the fretting-hand shape you already know, but skip a string on the way across and let the skipped string ring nothing at all. Mute it — palm mute from the picking hand, or a lazy fretting finger flopped across it — because the whole illusion collapses the second that middle string speaks. Practise it slowly with hybrid picking (pick down, middle finger plucks up) and the leap does the expressive work for you.
Free tab and Guitar Pro file are in the description, so you can skip strings instead of skipping practice. And if you want the slow-motion videos and the Guitar Pro vault, my Patreon is right there, patiently muting the middle string of my bank account.