Greg Herriges - Blues Guitar Songs for Dummies (Music Instruction)

The skeleton of blues and rock riffs and solos, the minor pentatonic scale is made of five notes (penta means five), played and repeated in any order. You can play this scale all over the neck, depending on where the root note is. There are five boxes or positions of the scale boxes 1 and 2 are the ones youll use the most. (A common key is A, where box 1 is rooted on fret 5.) Notice how box 2 begins where box 1 ends, and so on, so you can shift up the neck to play all five positions.

This is just the skeleton, and blues players usually add extra meat to it blue notes and extensions often turning it into something called the blues scale or the Mixolydian mode. Dont sweat the terms, but keep an eye out for the notes, and notice how some players have distinctive, signature ways of extending their scales.

You might hear some talk of the major pentatonic scale in these pages. Think of it as the same scale, with a different root for example, if you play box 1 as a major pentatonic scale, the top note is your root. Many blues guitarists can smoothly interchange and mix major and minor pentatonic. In blues, if it sounds good, its legal!

Want to build monster chops? Run up and down these box positions, over and over, until you can do it cleanly at blazing speed (or your neighbors start complaining).

Words and Music by John Lee Hooker and Bernard Besman