AYNSLEY LISTER Video Masterclass PT3
In the final instalment of our three-part video feature, blues ace Aynsley Lister demonstrates his lead style by playing a fantastic solo over a 12/8 slow blues backing track in the style of BB King. Jon Bishop is your guide.
Aynsley Lister finishes his highly popular video masterclass series with a superb Freddie King, BB King or Peter Green style slow 8-bar blues.
This month Aynsley’s live band has laid down a slow 12/8 feel track with an easy tempo of 52 bpm. It’s an eight-bar form with an interesting F# Diminished chord. As usual we have written out the chord chart for you to work from. This form is fairly straightforward to solo over and has been used to great effect by bluesman such as BB King, Peter Green and Freddie King.
As Aynsley explains in the video, it works well to stick to your guns and solo straight through the Diminished chord using straight C Minor Pentatonic vocabulary. You can of course play Diminished scale ideas to fit the chord, but this may end up sounding less authentic. The three-octave Blues scalefingering pattern that we have notated, is similar to the one we used last time, but here it’s in the key of C. This fingering has proved very effective throughout this series and is pretty much a one-stop-shop for blues-rock soloing in any key - if, of course, you shift it to the corresponding position on the neck.
To spice up this position and add some extra sophistication, we have added the 6th and the 9th, which are used in the solo as flavour tones and string bending points. As the key signature is 12/8 and the tempo is a super slow blues, ironically you have space to play faster lines and more notes.
The combination of the time signature and tempo makes the notation look pretty intimidating, but the phrases are not overly tricky to play, so the key here is to have a good listen to Anysley’s original performance and use the notated rhythms as a guide. In the lesson section Aynsley shares the idea that it is nice to give a ‘tip of the hat’ to the players who would have used this type of chord backing. The three main bluesmen to reference are BB King, Freddie King and Peter Green, and two great tracks to check out are Need Your Love So Bad by Fleetwood Mac, and Someday After A While by Freddie King - there’s no better way to sound informed than to be able to quote the blues greats.
As ever, the notation contains all of the fingerings, articulations and phrasing from the video performance. It will be well worth taking a close look at the way Aynsley fingers and picks the phrases. The ideas here are all relatively easy to play, especially at a slower tempo and taking this slowly at first is definitely the way forward.
to spice things up aynsley uses the 6th and 9th as flavour tones and as string bending points
NEXT MONTH We have a one-off masterclass with solo fingerstyle guitarist