25 Blues Scale Licks for Blues Guitar
Published by www.fundamental-changes.com
Copyright 2014 Joseph Alexander
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www.fundamental-changes.com
Also By Joseph Alexander
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Minor ii V Mastery for Jazz Guitar
Jazz Blues Soloing for Guitar
Guitar Scales in Context
Drop 2 Chord Voicings for Jazz and Modern Guitar
The CAGED System and 100 Licks for Blues Guitar
The Complete Guide to Playing Blues Guitar Book One: Rhythm Guitar
The Complete Guide to Playing Blues Guitar Book Two: Melodic Phrasing
The Complete Guide to Playing Blues Guitar Book Three: Beyond Pentatonics
The Complete Guide to Playing Blues Guitar Compilation (Paperback)
The Complete Technique, Theory and Scales Compilation for Guitar (Paperback)
Sight Reading Mastery for Guitar
Complete Technique for Modern Guitar
Rock Guitar Un-CAGED: The CAGED System and 100 Licks for Rock Guitar
Contents
Introduction
All examples in this book are available as free audio downloads from http://www.fundamental-changes.com/mini-guitar-book-audio-downloads/
This book contains 25 new and original minor blues guitar licks. There are 5 licks for each of the 5 blues scale shapes shown below.
Each lick has a corresponding audio example which is available for free download (no strings attached!) from http://www.fundamental-changes.com/mini-guitar-book-audio-downloads/ just click on the downloads link. Also included are 3, high quality backing tracks at different speeds to get you playing as soon as possible.
Also in this book there is a great section on how to practice these lines so they naturally incorporate into your playing.
This book came out of a need to develop great blues playing in many of my 40+ weekly private guitar students. Every line in this book has been tried and tested on private students who pay many multiples of the cost of this book. Its all good stuff and every line contained in these pages will teach you something about a different area of the guitar neck whilst teaching you some great lines to play.
If you dont already know them, here are the 5 shapes of the blues scale in the key of A. To learn them, play and visualise the chord (red dots) and then play through the scale.
This book is a short sample of the longer work, The CAGED System and 100 Licks for Blues Guitar, which delves deeply into the CAGED system and teaches you vocabulary for all over your guitar neck. The 106 page volume is available on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle Download.
It covers Major and Minor Pentatonic scales, The Blues Scale and The Mixolydian Mode.
The first two chapters are included as a free gift at the end of this book.
-100 Top Quality Blues Licks-
-Complete Method to Learn the Guitar Neck-
-Over 1 Hour of Live Examples and Audio for FREE Download-
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The Blues Scale
The blues scale is strongly related to the minor pentatonic scale, in fact they are exactly the same apart from the addition of one single note. This note, however is almost definitive of a blues solo.
I would go as far as to say that Ive never heard a blues solo played that does not contain this extra note at some point.
This isnt a book about theory, so if you understand that were adding a b5 (flattened 5th) to the minor Pentatonic scale thats great, If you dont then all you need to know is how to play these excellent sounds.
Lets compare the notes of A Minor Pentatonic to the notes of the A Blues Scale:
The additional note is located in the lower octave on the 5th string and in the upper octave on the 3rd string.
While it may seem like a small addition, this is one of the most powerful ideas we can use in blues soloing.
I simply want you to learn where the blues note additions lie in each of the 5 shapes. Here are how the other 4 shapes alter:
When you are familiar with the blues note variations, start examining the licks for each shape below. Once again, there are 5 licks for each shape. Notice how each lick makes use of, and resolves, the extra b5 note.
Blues Scale Shape 1 Licks
Figure and audio example 1.1a
Figure and audio example 1.1b
Figure and audio example 1.1c