Martin taylor: the inbetweeners
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!
WelCoMe To the penultimate lesson of this six-part series where we’ve been transforming the minor pentatonic scale into something that will give you a distinctly jazzy edge when playing over blues changes. We’ve done this by taking the basic framework of the minor pentatonic – one of the most wellknown shapes on anyone’s fretboard – and literally filling in the blanks. We’ve added notes from the A major scale and I’ve demonstrated how these ‘extra’ notes can help create a jazzier feel. We’ve also seen how some notes work better than others. An E, A major’s 5th, for example, is going to sit nicely over a root note of A for as long as you like, but try the same trick with the major 7th – in A major’s case, G# – and you’re headed for melodic doomsday! Practice and experience will sort the dependable notes from the ones that take more careful handling and in the end your ear will guide your fingers to all the right places on the fretboard.
Now we’re going to deal with the stragglers and, in doing so, we’ll end this series with the whole of the chromatic scale at our disposal. These notes have some pretty scary jazz names such as 2nd, #5th and 5th, but as I explain in the video, they can be categorised as ‘travelling notes’ in that we mainly use them to move into a scale tone. Another name for them is ‘passing notes’ – it’s the same thing. If you think of all the notes in the chromatic scale as being like a paintbox, there are some colours that you’ll use a lot of the time and others you’ll use far more scarcely. So whereas with colour it’s the eye that makes the choice, with musical colours it’s all down to the ear. A lot of the time, it’s down to personal taste as to how you use your musical colours and that forms the basis of your style. Some players like to keep things sweet and stay with the consonant, good-sounding notes, while others like to introduce darkness and tension into their playing, and these players will use the more dissonant intervals.
In any case, study the solo I’ve put together; next month I’ll play a graduation piece – a fully blown jazz blues solo. Until then, good luck!