IN THE WOODSHED
This month Charlie Griffiths is aiming to transform your blues improvisation with a simple one-note Pentatonic Dominant trick.
Charlie Griffiths brings you five great licks using the Hendrix/Gilbert ‘Dominant 7 trick’..
Improvising over a blues can be as simple or complicated as you want to make it. The usual starting point is to use the minor Pentatonic from the tonic chord and have fun playing licks and bending strings to your heart’s content. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, as players like BB King have proven for decades. However, if you want to inject a bit of jazziness to your licks then it is simpler than you might think. In this lesson we will take a common blues chord change; the I chord moving to the V chord. This could be A7-E7, Am7- E7 or the same relative chords in any other key.
The trick is as simple as changing one note. Start by playing your familiar A Minor pentatonic on the I chord (A-C-D-E-G), then when the E7 comes along, change the A to G#, keeping the other four notes where they are. Example 1 demonstrates what this looks and sounds like using shape 1 of the Minor Pentatonic, or the ‘root on the sixth string’ shape. Just this simple single note change is very effective and provides a ‘Robben Ford meets Paul Gilbert’ flavour. Example 2 is the same concept applied to the ‘root on the fifth string’ shape. As you play through these, remember that only the root note needs to shift down a semitone. This works because this hybrid scale shape’s true root note is actually from the V chord’s root note, producing the intervals 1-#9-3-#5- b7. This is an interesting collection of intervals because it is essentially a Dominant 7 arpeggio (1-3- b7), with the #9 and #5 interval added.
Technically speaking this puts us in Super Locrian aka Altered Scale territory which is usually spelled out as 1- b9- 3-#9- b5-# 5- b7. Although good to have this theoretical information to back up the reasons why things work, the proof of the scale is in the playing, so with Examples 3 and 4 we do just that with a couple of licks based on this simple but extremely effective manoeuvre. The first lick is in A Minor and the second lick is in E Minor; this should give you a good enough starting point to be able to move the licks to any key you desire.
Example 5 has one more simple trick you can try. This time we add the IV chord, giving us the I-IV and V we usually see in a blues. For the IV chord, take your initial A Minor Pentatonic, move it down three frets (to F#), then flatten the 5th. So in essence we are playing an F# Minor Pentatonic ( b5) over the D7 chord. This gives us the intervals 3-5- b7- 913, or a ‘D13’ sound over our IV chord, which is a very colourful and pleasant effect. This, coupled with our initial trick, now gives you a simple way of playing three different sounds over three different chords which will transform your blues improvisation.
NEXT MONTH Charlie brings you another scale twist as he looks at using the ‘ Lydian trick’