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Nailing the Changes Through Blues Guitar Solos - Part 4

Labelled ‘the thinking man’s blues player’, Robben Ford has an original twist on the minor pentatonic. He replaces the customary b7 with the brighter major 6, a note present in the major pentatonic. For this solo study I plumped for Ford’s hybrid pentatonic for all A7 chords.

Nailing the Changes Through Blues Guitar Solos - Part 3

In this part we’re in Larry Carlton territory for solo 3 and our first look at Vertical improvisation. Larry Carlton is a master at extracting all the juicy notes out of a scale without always running up and down in sequential order.

Nailing the Changes Through Blues Guitar Solos - Part 2

Does you blues soloing lack the melodic lyricism of Eric Clapton or SRV, or perhaps you’d like to add some slippery, modern dissonance like John Scofield or Scott Henderson? These series of articles explore the various ways you can use the architecture of a chord sequence to really spice up your soloing vocabulary and add an air of sophistication and real authority to your playing.

Following from the previous article, this time we're looking at BB King style of phrasing blues.

Nailing the Changes Through Blues Guitar Solos - Part 1

Does your blues soloing lack the melodic lyricism of Eric Clapton or SRV, or perhaps you’d like to add some slippery, modern dissonance like John Scofield or Scott Henderson? These series of articles explore the various ways you can use the architecture of a chord sequence to really spice up your soloing vocabulary and add an air of sophistication and real authority to your playing, Nailing the Changes. All solos follow the conventional 12 bar blues format in A, arranged to get more colourful harmonically as we progress. There’s no funny business with the chords, just I, IV, and V. Any inherent ‘Bluesy’ or ‘Jazzy’ feel is a result of the notes selected against the underlying changes. Study the relationship carefully and all of these tones can be at your disposal.

Continuing from the previous article this one will look at using distorted guitar harmonies, firstly using riffs then for lead work.

This concludes this series of articles on guitar harmonies.

The examples in these next two articles are all from my own work with my band Indighost. I chose to do this because since I wrote them I can give an insight into the writing process, rather than merely analyzing someone else’s work. In this article I will look at examples using clean sounds and the following one will use distorted guitars.

The previous article focussed on the basic approach to writing harmonies, in this one we will look at some more progressive examples.

Quartal Harmony is something that has been around for centuries. One of the earliest uses of it was by composers such as Frederic Copin and Franz List in the 1800’s. It became more common place in modern music through jazz pianists such as Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Jazz guitarists such as Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass and George Benson soon picked it up and started using it in their own playing.

In this article I am going to give examples of different approaches to writing guitar harmonies. I feel this is an often overlooked aspect of writing but of course you need a band with two guitarists to be able to pull it off live. This should give you some ideas on how to add new textures to your own compositions.

Levi Clay - Bop 'n' Roll Part 6 (tritone scale)

Musical harmony has come a long way in the last 150 years, so far in fact that it could be easy to fall into a rut of repetition, never breaking any new ground. Bebop itself was born out of frustration and experimentation, the youth of the day pushing the boundaries and seeing what happened. Today we're going to look at some post bop experementation that you might find in the lines of saxophonists like Michael Brecker and Jerry Bergonzi. he focus will be the synthetic scale known as the tritone scale, so come and have a look if you want to insert a little of the devil into your playing.