Keep it up! The diagram below shows the 5 Blues Scale Patterns spread over the length of the guitar neck. You can use the Eb as a passing note to reach the E natural, adding a very temporary sense of unease and sadness to your playing, before resolving it on a positive note. You can certainly play the blues with some serious crunch, but you don’t want to be filling your music with a wall of fuzzy, unintelligible sound better suited for heavy metal. If you just want to play the scale then start and stop on the green tonic notes (as shown in the TAB). This last lick is over C7 and uses the C major blues scale. This added scale tone is a f5th in the minor pentatonic. The major pentatonic scale is made up of five of those notes (1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 of the major scale). To derive the A minor blues scale, for example, apply the corresponding formula to an A major scale: As you can see, we’ve simply added a blue note – a flattened fifth – to the minor pentatonic scale. They played together in the band Temple Of The Dog. The basic blues scale pattern (pattern 1) can be extended up and down the guitar fretboard using the additional scale patterns. Play the 12-bar blues using downstrokes and emphasize the first and third beat of every measure to get the right rhythm. You’ll only have to add a C note to the A major pentatonic. So, make sure that you differentiate the major from the minor blues scales in your practicing so that they are distinct and easy to move between when you apply them to your jazz guitar solos. Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and BB King, for example, have cemented themselves as icons. How To Get A Jazz Guitar Sound: The Guitar, Strings, Pick and Amplifier You Need For A Jazz Tone, What is a Chorus Pedal, What Does A Chorus Pedal Do, And How / When to Use Chorus in Your Playing, Lydian Scale Guitar: Learn How To Play The Lydian Modal Scale On Your Guitar, What is a Compressor Pedal, What Does A Compressor Pedal Do, And How / When to Use Compression in Your Playing. Notice how the patterns overlap and connect to eachother down the guitar neck. Either way, his approach to the blues is classic and completely iconic, and can have a huge impact on the way you play in just about any genre. You can’t talk about blues on the guitar without mentioning the so-called blues scale, which is really just a pentatonic scale with a chromatic passing tone. For example, a Dorian b5 is made up of the notes C, D, Eb, F, Gb, A, Bb. Scale diagrams often include notes that are either above or below the tonic notes in this way. We may link to products if we deem helpful to the reader. Experiment linking each of the five patterns on this page with its neighboring patterns to create your own extended lines. Therefore, the notes in a C blues scale are: The blues scale contains a minor 3rd, giving it a minor tonality. Here are the scale diagrams for a G major blues scale. Of course, the minor pentatonic already has a ♭3. The guitar has the rare advantage of being able to operate in quarter (and even smaller) tones, thanks to its ability to bend strings. As such, you’ll keep the C at the top and bottom of whatever you play, meaning you won’t sound like you’re in the wrong key, but you will be able to make your way through pretty much whatever chromaticism you desire. Another common example: A major pentatonic over A7, then A minor pentatonic over D7. Why learn more than one pattern for each scale? The A minor blues scale in the 7th position starts with your index finger on the 7th fret of the D string. Thanks for the site – it’s a good resource for my students. The main riff centres around two great sliding chords that sound so natural because they’re built on blue notes that work perfectly in context. Some of the most interesting moments come in the first few seconds of the track. The third lick is in the key of E minor and uses the 4th shape of the E minor blues scale. Quarter-notes are rare and almost never used; their presence in blues is almost never pre-meditated by players, and should remain that way.