Breaking The Habit
Difficulty 10–15 mins per example
Tutor: Adrian Clark
If you grew up in a shack in Mississippi, with deep Delta spirit running through your veins, and can wring several songs worth of pure heartbreak from a single pentatonic scale, you probably don’t need this lesson. This is for all the people who like to play a bit of blues, but often find themselves running out of soloing ideas. Once you’ve run through your favourite blues licks, where do you go next?
Blues is often seen more for its limitations than for its possibilities, and that’s a shame. It’s not hard to see why that happens, though. It’s used as an easy starting point for beginners, where you just need three chords and a pentatonic scale, but then so many of us never look any deeper. There are rich possibilities for expanding your blues vocabulary, just like any other musical style.
What I’d like you to do first is try to get out of the habit of thinking of a ‘blues scale’. Despite the old stereotype of noodling up and down the pentatonic, blues is actually one of the least scale-based musical styles! There are various scales that work over a blues progression, but all the great players have always worked on several levels, using scales, notes from the underlying chords and varying numbers of ‘outside’ notes.
That said, I’ve built this solo around the familiar 5th-fret A minor pentatonic box, just to show how much melodic variety you can reach from there. Over a standard 12-bar progression, it’s possible to use all 12 notes from the chromatic scale with a little care… they’re all in my solo! Admittedly, this is a little on the extreme side, and I certainly wouldn’t play like this normally, but hopefully it’ll give you some ideas to work on.
If you feel safer working in a scale environment for now, try using A Mixolydian (A B C# D E F# G) over the A7 chords, and A Dorian (A B C D E F# G) over the D7 and E7.
Gear used: Gibson ES-335 (lead) and Fender Strat (rhythm), Fractal Axe-Fx (Fender-type amp models)
This will already mean that you’re targeting more of the useful chord notes.
You can, of course, use the faithful old minor pentatonic over all the chords, but try hammering (or bending) from the C to the C# when you use it over the A7 chord. The C creates a tension, and it’s up to you how long you hold that before resolving to the C#. When you’re ready to go further, start off by learning the notes of the chords (see Ex4), and compare them with the notes of the scales listed above. You could also try the jazzy trick of approaching a chord note from a semitone above or below; again, this creates a momentary tension or dissonance.
Enjoy working your way through these examples, and Neville Marten will return as usual next issue.