It’s been a while since we’ve looked at blues soloing, so I thought I’d add to the Blues Soloing Tricks series of posts with a quick lesson on using the upper chord extensions to get a jazzier sound in standard…
Category: Blues
Blues Soloing Tricks: How to Use Multiple Scales in a 12-Bar Blues
A lot of guitarists tend to waste their practice time due to lack of focus, organization and discipline, and most of the time this is completely unintentional. How many times have you sat down to practice and just ended up…
Blues Soloing Tricks: The Versatile 6
Continuing our series on blues soloing tricks, we look at how to use the different intervals in blues playing, we come to the versatile 6. The 6 is not part of the minor pentatonic or blues scales, but it can…
Blues Soloing Tricks: What to Do with the 4
This lesson follows on from the approach we looked at in Blues Soloing Tricks: How to Blend Major and Minor Sounds, so be sure to check that one out if you haven’t already as it contains the building blocks for…
Blues Soloing Tricks: The Blue Note
The blues note is of course the b5, and if you’ve been following this series of blog posts, you’ll find it just after the 4, which we looked at in Blues Soloing Tricks: What to Do with the 4. I…
Blues Soloing Tricks: How to Blend Major and Minor Sounds
In my opinion, the hallmark of good blues soloing is the ability to seamlessly blend major and minor scales/licks/runs to exploit that minor/major third ambiguity in the blues. If you feel that your blues soloing isn’t sounding authentic enough, this…
Soloing Over Chord Changes: How to Start
Transitioning from blowing up and down pentatonic scales to purposely crafting your solos by taking the chord changes into account can be frustrating for guitarists. It’s also a blow to the ego as you basically have to suck it up,…
Blues Soloing Tricks: Instant Clapton
Eric Clapton spearheaded the British blues explosion back in the sixties during what many believe to be his best playing. I personally love all of Clapton’s eras, and can only admire his evolution as a guitarist, songwriter and musician over…
My Blues Improvisation Practice Routine (Part 3)
If you’ve been following this series (go to: Part 1 | Part 2), and practicing the material, you should now have more than enough patterns and concepts under your fingers to be able to get some tasty blues soloing happening…
My Blues Improvisation Practice Routine (Part 2)
In Part 1 we looked at four of the most common scales used in blues soloing and how to learn them in positions. We also focused on learning the individual sounds of these scales and blending them to create more…