Joseph Alexander - The Complete Guide to Playing Blues Guitar Book Two: Lead Guitar Melodic Phrasing

Book Two - Melodic Phrasing

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Book Two - Melodic Phrasing

Published by www.fundamental-changes.com

ISBN: 978-1495938450

Copyright 2013 Joseph Alexander

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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Fundamental Changes Ltd.

www.fundamental-changes.com

Also By Joseph Alexander

The Complete Guide to Playing Blues Guitar Book One: Rhythm Guitar

Fundamental Changes in Jazz Guitar I: The Major ii V I for Bebop Guitar

Minor ii V Mastery for Jazz Guitar

Drop 2 Chord Voicings for Jazz and Modern Guitar

The CAGED System and 100 Licks for Blues Guitar

Complete Technique for Modern Guitar

Rock Guitar Un-CAGED: The CAGED System and 100 Licks for Rock Guitar

The Practical Guide to Modern Music Theory for Guitarists

15 Essential Guitar Lesson for Beginners

Musical Examples Recorded and Mixed by Pete Sklaroff .

The second book in this series on blues guitar playing focuses on the most important ideas, musical concepts and techniques that you will need to develop in order to become a well-rounded, competent and expressive blues guitar soloist.

This book is not simply a list of The Hundred Greatest Blues Licks or yet another Play in the Style of

While I dont discount the usefulness of titles like these, what I am aiming to do in this book is to get deeper into the concepts of rhythm, phrasing, feel and melody that will take you to a new level in your playing.

The idea is to not simply teach you to play and regurgitate blues licks: I want to teach you to be in control of every note that you play. The goal is not to play 100 different blues licks; it is to be able to play 1 blues lick in 100 different ways.

If you listen to your favourite players really carefully, you will begin to notice similar parent licks re-occurring throughout their solos. The reason that this is not immediately obvious is that these players are masters of manipulating their phrasing, rhythm and feel.

By thinking about your guitar solos in terms of rhythm and phrasing you will never run out of melodic ideas. You will never have to worry about forgetting your lines or being able to execute them live on stage. Your musical connection with your guitar will deepen and you will quickly develop the ability to express yourself through your guitar, rather than the all too common scenario of having to chase licks around the fretboard.

When I introduce my private students to the concepts contained in this book, there is often a major paradigm shift. They will tend to start to think about music in terms of note placement rather than the specific notes themselves. Of course, melody and note choice is important, but when you consider we all have the same 12 notes available to us, the only logical conclusion is that it is rhythm, phrasing, dynamics and articulation that set us apart from other players.

This is even truer in a blues guitar solo where we may only be playing 5 or 6 different pitches. Its very much a case of when you play, not what you play.

If you are looking for a book full of blues licks, dont despair! The first part of this book focuses on some of the important blues guitar basics, helping to get you into the sound of each important scale we use in the blues. In fact there are over 100 unique blues licks contained in these pages spread over the 5 most commonly used shapes for each scale we cover. Its important to get the sound of the language into your head before you start experimenting with the rhythm and phrasing concepts outlined later in the book.

If you need more blues guitar licks, my book The CAGED System and 100 Licks for Blues Guitar will teach you a complete system to learn the guitar while giving you 100 blues licks to get your teeth into.

What I hope to achieve with this book is a guide that is suitable for beginners but also for the intermediate and advancing guitarist: I use a system that is based on a more rhythmic, musical approach to improvisation rather than a simple copy-these-licks based one.

If youve been playing a while you may wish to skip some of the introductions to scales and jump to some of the more appropriate rhythm and phrasing sections . However, I would suggest that you do read the parts that you feel you might already know. There might be a little lick, trick or even a whole mental system that could make a subtle or intrinsic difference to your playing.

As always in my books, every notated example is available as a free download from www.fundamental-changes.com . Thank you to my teacher Pete Sklaroff for recording them so musically and professionally.

If youre reading this book on Kindle or another eReader I will happily send you a high-res .pdf of the book but please accurately follow the instructions at the back of the book.

I hope this book makes a positive difference to your playing. Some of the rhythmic exercises may be tricky at first but listen to the audio examples carefully and youll get there. These days, rhythm and phrasing are about 70% of my practice time and I wish Id known about the ideas in this book a long time ago.

For a more complete introduction to the roots of the blues, check out book one of this series, The Complete Guide to Blues Guitar Book One: Rhythm, where I give much more background on the roots of the blues and some essential listening.

Another reason that I recommend having a copy of book one in your possession is that book two does not give a huge amount of detail about the chords for the blues progressions that we are soloing over . The structure of the 12 bar blues is assumed knowledge and covered in meticulous detail in book one.

If you know how a 12 bar blues functions then you will get great insight into the building blocks of blues guitar soloing from this book. If not, then I suggest getting yourself familiar with this essential chord form either via The Complete Guide to Blues Guitar: Book One or via the multitude of free learning resources on the internet.

As always, have fun!

Joseph Alexander

06/01/14

All audio downloads in this book are available from http://www.fundamental-changes.com/melodic-phrasing-audio-downloads/

Or via the Audio Downloads menu at www.fundamental-changes.com

The melodic language of blues originates from the spirituals, work songs and field hollers sung by African-Americans in the era of captivity, and in the years that followed emancipation. As a result, the blues is rich in African-American rhythm, harmony, melody and phrasing. One of the most important melodic structures that retains a strong link to this time is the performance of call and response, or antiphony, where one musical question is sung, and is then answered by different voices.

When musicologists formalised and incorporated the melodies they had transcribed into traditional western musical thinking (classical theory), they found that many of the melodies were formed from just 5 notes. The term pentatonic refers to a scale that uses 5 notes to divide up the octave.

Pent = five,

Tonic = tones.

In addition to this minor pentatonic scale, they noticed that singers also often used their voices to slide and bend from one note smoothly into another. If youre reading on an eReader check out this incredible, short clip of an early gospel choir: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqgL7MSYVuM if not, search for Early African American Spiritual Gospel Choir, uploaded by Patterickcoati.