How To Play Guitar
How To Play The 3 Most Important Scales For Any Blues Guitarist
Understanding blues guitar scales is really important to make your tunes sounds like the blues. Luckily blues guitar scales are fairly easy. The emphasis is placed on phrasing and expressive techniques rather than a wide variety of guitar scales and mode usage.
Just using the minor pentatonic, major pentatonic, and a variation of the minor pentatonic called the blues scale, is more than enough for most blues players. More scales and modes are used, but these basic ones are generally the ones used in songs that sound “bluesy.”
Guitar Scales and Modes
While this lesson doesn’t deal with a variety of modes and scales, a guitarist at some point will come across the two terms, and quite often they lead to confusion. The reason it is confusing isn’t because it is an important concept relating too subtlety different concepts, it is confusing because it is really just an arbitrary relationship that has little functional purpose.
Music is based around the interval between pitches, not the pitches themselves, the fact a scale and mode technically have all the same pitches is arbitrary, they aren’t used the same. For example, a fire in built using pieces of wood and a chair is built using pieces of wood, that doesn’t mean a chair can cook food or a fire is a nice place to sit, despite both technically have the same basic component, what is important is how it is used.
Minor Pentatonic Scale
This pretty much is the most common scale in a lot of blues and rock music, and it is quite simple (if you are familiar with intervals, it is 1 b3 4 5 b7). It is essentially the minor scale with two notes pulled out of it.
One of the nice aspects of this scale is none of the notes really can sound particularly wrong over quite a lot of rhythm parts used in blues music. The two box shapes shown below are quite convenient and movable up and down the fretboard, so that whatever note is in the place of the yellow dot indicates what key it is in.
Major Pentatonic Scale
The major pentatonic, while not as commonly used does give a bit more options for brighter, happier sounding parts. The intervals it contains are 1 2 3 5 6, and is essentially the major scale with two notes removed.
Odds are most aspiring blues guitarists may very well never actually use it in a song, but it is still a nice thing to know. Like the minor pentatonic, it is movable, with the notes indicated in yellow indicating the key of the scale.
Blues Scale
The appropriately enough names blues scale is also quite commonly used in blues music.
The blues scale is just the minor pentatonic with one extra note added, the diminished fifth (which is highlighted in red on the diagram above).
This is the most dissonant interval in music and it can add a lot of interest to a part, but it doesn’t lend a bluesy feel most of the time if used to much. Practice using it in your phrasing until you can consistently make it sound bluesy.
These three scales are quite important to learn to play blues guitar. While from a music theory standpoint they aren’t too complicated, when combined with expressive lead techniques, they can really stand out and lead to some rather amazing blues solos
August 22, 2008 at 6:58 pm | Learn Guitar Scales | No comment