Blues Guitar Soloing Lesson
In this video, Matthew Charles Heulitt will show you how to play the minor blues caged for soloing in the style of B.B. King from his “The Complete Guitarist” guitar course.
So we’re going to expand on this caged guitar lesson sort of one note thing we’re going to let you play a few more notes here but let me set up a loop and jam with it and I’m going to show you a little bit more about that.
Okay, so you’re probably familiar with the cage idea, the B.B. King minor kind of thing. So just just to review, here’s my root okay because everything’s about the root right now and I’m playing that on the 10th fret of the B string with my third finger and I’m just dealing with a cage of five notes. So we have the root the flat three the four and then the root going down we have the root the flat seven and a five okay so again there’s a little bit to the choreography of how to place these notes and that’s why i want to start you with the root on one.
Okay and then making little moves around that so let’s just let me just do a little bit of that i’m not going to do anything fancy. So i missed a couple ones i don’t know if you noticed that breaking my own rules so there’s just some really simple things to do in here and and you want to understand what you can bend and what you can’t what you can inflict and what you probably shouldn’t you should steer away from so in general don’t mess with the root don’t bend it right that’s like your home base that’s your grounding that’s your foundation so you want to stay there.
Okay you can give it a little shake that’s fine you can even take the bar to it a little bit i’m doing a little rake into the one all right that’s cool i even did some slides into it okay but in general just leave that being now we’ll see some of the other notes so this next note up you can mess with a little bit you can do like a little like a half step quarter step bend right.
Okay simple enough and then let’s talk about this next note so this guy you can totally bend and you can bend it in a couple different ways. That’s a half step bend okay or one fret you can do a whole step bend two frets okay and you can do anything in between.
So that’s kind of a really great note to mess with and kind of dance with you can push it around and i’m always coming back to the root and sometimes doing that little it’s like a little clapton little kind of afterthought at the end and then the note down below these two guys they’re not you’re not really in a position there to bend so don’t don’t mess with them you can give them a little shake.
So really these lower three notes in this box of five you basically those are kind of as is now you can inflict them with vibrato you can slide into them and that and whatnot but these higher notes definitely mess with so let me kind of show you that in action again.
Okay so i’m not hitting all the ones but i’m trying to come back to that like there’s definitely not more than two bars that go by where i’m not hitting a root on one okay and again this comes back to less is more spend more time like even if you’re like a seasoned soloist limit yourself because in limitation you actually come up with some freedom because you’re forced into a situation that you’re not used to you can’t fall back on your old habits to really make music and to evoke emotion again that’s that’s the whole thing that we want here so sometimes being a great player means putting aside all the stuff that you know all these chops and whatever and being able to sit with five notes and really make some good music.
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