Modern Funky Blues

SOMETIMES IT’S INTERESTING to think about when the electric blues was an ‘up and coming’ genre, before Eric Clapton and his Gibson Les Paul, before the invention of the overdrive pedal and the era of guitar shops full of people noodling on the pentatonic scale. The idea of electric guitar was new – and resisted by many (especially Gibson!) – but players were looking for new sounds, or perhaps simply to be heard in the first instance, later realising the possibilities amplification brought to the table. For many, this reached its zenith with artists such as Jimi Hendrix, who combined his instrumental skills with an array of pioneering gadgetry, as well as his legendary showmanship.

In the present day, we have an astonishing amount of well-documented and recorded influences to refer to, so it’s hardly surprising if we sometimes feel we’re looking backwards more than we look forwards. In this example solo, I’ve tried to reappraise my own approach from every angle. Rather than going for the relatively easy option of a forgiving overdriven tone and a 12-bar backing track, the tone is clean (albeit heavily compressed) and the backing style owes more to funk than blues. There’s plenty of pentatonic phrasing, but there is also a chordal element coming in towards the end of the solo. Starting out with fingerstyle technique allows me to ‘ping’ the strings against the fretboard with a twangy attack, enhanced by the compression.

The repeated phrase in the first example is definitely a blues device, but it’s used here in a different context. Why not try dialling up the sort of tone you would never normally use to play solo and see where it takes you?