Welcome back! Today I wanna give you one of the best blues guitar lessons you’ll get in a long
time. Get ready.
When I think about Blues, the first thing that pops into my mind is the Pentatonic Minor Scale. It
is the most easy scale to play; any beginner can learn this scale in a matter of minutes if not
seconds. I wanna show a very easy way to come up with very melodic and interesting ideas;
Let’s talk about repetition for a moment. Repetition is very similar to motif, infact a motif is
basically an idea (or a lick) that repeats in the same way or in a very similar way. For a moment,
let’s grab a very simple pentatonic lick like the next one:
It is clearly in A minor pentatonic and it sounds very much like a blues lick. Now, our goal here is
to come up with different licks that sound very similar to the one I just showed you, but yet
different. Why? well imagine you are playing a show and you start jamming, you don’t wanna
play random stuff that don’t connect to each other right? You wanna play something that feels
like a melody, or something that at least makes sense. If you start playing random notes that
have nothing to do with each other then it is just gonna sound weird. That’s why with this
technique we are gonna make sure that all the lines you are playing are very related to each
other. For instance, what if we grab the lick I just showed you and only modify the ending:
Now try playing the first line I introduced and this one above; one after the other. It sounds cool
right? it’s almost like if the second one is a response to the first one. Now, what if we changed
the beginning, like this:
Here we are changing the first 4 notes but keeping the last 2 notes. We are also keeping the
same rhythm pattern, and well, it sounds like it belongs there! That’s another great way alter a
lick.
What if we grabbed the second lick I showed you and only change one note? Let’s check it out:
It sounds great! It’s another response; and by the way, we are changing the fifth note. So there you have it. Now you can go ahead and come up with a great lick that you love and compose a whole solo out of it.
This is all for today! I hope you enjoyed this lesson and please remember to check out our entire collection of videos at:
