Lick: Hammer-On From Nowhere based lick.

Here's a lick which heavily focuses on legato techniques for the guitar, this lick includes hammer-ons, pull-offs, tapping and hammer-ons from nowhere (heavily heard in a lot of Greg Howe's playing).

The notes conform to F# Mixolydian, but the lick could be used in other applications.

Here's the tablature and the notation for the lick:

While the tab ends after two repeats, it is possible to repeat this lick over until you feel comfortable with the legato pattern.

To get the most out of this lick, transpose it to other keys, also come up with your own licks which use a wide array of legato techniques.

Black Napkins style backing track.

Here's a new backing track, in the style of the song "Black Napkins" by Frank Zappa. This backing is a two chord idea in 3/4. The two chords used in this song are C#m7 and Dmaj7. Appropriate scales that could be used are the C# Natural minor, minor pentatonic, or Dorian scale, similarly to some of the ideas which are played in the original recording of the song Black Napkins. Though I would recommend experimenting with different notes over the Dmaj7 chord.

Here is the link to an mp3 file of the backing track:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15967191/Black%20Napkins%20Style%20Backing%20Track.mp3

I'll note that this is not intended to be an exact backing track to Frank Zappa's Black Napkins, it's merely a tool to aid the practice of soloing and improvising, however, as my demonstration video shows, it is possible to play the main themes to the original song over this backing track with no transposition.

I hope this helps anyone and I hope you have fun jamming to it!

Thanks!