Darrel Higham: rockabilly Lead
The second in our exclusive two-part series moves onto some fiery leads, built up around those rhythmic chord changes we saw last month
For THiS SEConD lESSon, Darrel turns his attention to rockabilly lead styles. As you’ll see, it’s crucial that you don’t separate the two disciplines of ‘rhythm’ and ‘lead’ too much; as in many styles, there’s quite a bit of overlap in rockabilly. On the video, Darrel stresses the importance of building solos around the chord changes. Apart from a few specialised styles, this is a good approach for most music, certainly in the fields of rock, pop, blues and jazz.
This doesn’t mean that you have to slavishly build licks around chord notes. You can still play in a scalar fashion, but by having an awareness of the chord changes, you can respond to them, changing your note choices to fit each chord. If you simply breeze up and down a scale pattern, the notes may well be entirely correct, but it’s all about the relationship between melody notes and chords, especially when you emphasise or sustain a note (‘target notes’).
Rockin’ The 12-Bar Blues
Even if you only learn to find the root note for each chord, you’ll have taken a huge step in making your solos more musical. The 12-bar blues progression is a good place to start, because it has such a familiar chord progression and you can easily grab the root notes of the three chords from the pentatonic box shape. Playing a blues in G, as in Example 1, practise building licks around the G note over the G7 chord, the C note over the C7 chord, and so on.
In the two solos overleaf, Darrel extends this principle, using all three notes of each major triad as target notes, filling the gaps with other scale notes. The rockabilly lead style is more tightly woven around the chords than other pop/rock styles, but these ideas can easily be applied to blues, country or jazz.
It’s all about the relationship between melody notes and chords, especially when you emphasise or sustain a note