Making New Music From Rhythm Guitar Chords And Blues Scales

Welcome back! Today I wanna show you one of the coolest blues guitar scales tabs I have
come up with lately.

So who says rhythm guitar is all about playing chords? One thing I’ve learned is that there are
no limits when it comes to making music. I wanna show a great way of replacing chords with an
awesome riff that outlines the chord of the moment.

So let’s say you have an A7 chord which is widely used among blues players. You are bored of
playing all the inversions and you just wanna improvise and come up with something different.
Well for instance, you could grab the scale of the moment and use it to come up with a riff. The
key here is to somehow keep the tonality of the moment, so if you are supposed to play an A7,
try to start your line with an “A” note. If you have a bass player that is constantly playing the A,
then that’s another thing because it just opens up a whole new world of possibilities; but for now
let’s pretend it is just you. For this A7 we are gonna use the A Blues scale and we are gonna do
something like this:

blues-guitar-scales-tabs_1.png

Notice how I started with the fifth fret which is an “A” and then only at the end I added some
extra notes. It is also a great idea to alternate the endings, specially if you are going to repeat
the same chord for 2 bars in a row, just like I did above; it makes it way more interesting and
fun. You can of course, simply transpose this motif to another key, if you were to play a D7 let’s
say, like this:

blues-guitar-scales-tabs_2.png

And of course you can do this with an entire progression, you can even mix endings, like I am
doing on bar 9th and 10th:

blues-guitar-scales-tabs_3.png

The key here is to learn the patterns and once you really know them, you’ll be able to play them
anywhere you want.

This is all for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and please remember to check out our entire database of videos.

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