Martin taylor: Beginning to swing
Adding a little jazz flavour to your blues licks can open up a wealth of new possibilities in your playing – this exclusive six-part series shows you how!
Tutor: Martin Taylor | Gear used: Mike Vanden Custom Martin Taylor Caprice
Hello And welCoMe to the second instalment of this series. This time, I’m looking at ways you can transform a simple blues into something that sounds altogether more jazzy. A sort of ‘back door’ into jazz, if you like. In the last issue, we looked at how a few straightforward manoeuvres can make a I-IV-V blues chord arrangement take on some of the trappings of jazz. You might not have got this completely under your fingers yet, but keep at it, because it’s an important factor in giving the blues a few jazzier overtones.
Meanwhile, we’ll begin to look at the other side of the business and consider what has to happen melodically when you play over the top. For these examples, I’m going to take what I think must be the most common scale type on the guitar – the minor pentatonic. What’s more, we’re going to look at it in its most familiar key, A minor. I’m sure this will be familiar to you and it’s a good starting point for us to begin to explore the language of jazz.
The pentatonic scale – a five-note sequence – is a sort of cut-down version of a full seven-note scale, so the major pentatonic is an abbreviated major scale and the minor has undergone the same treatment. What happens when we take the pentatonic scale as a framework and begin to colour it in with a few extra notes? In this instance, I’m talking about the 6th and the 9th – both very sweet-sounding melodic notes that can add a distinctly jazzy flavour to your melodic playing. Just making these two easy steps is all it takes to begin the transformation, so study the diagrams, work your way through the transcription and I’ll see you for more next month.