{"id":6361,"date":"2014-09-19T04:32:59","date_gmt":"2014-09-19T04:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=6361"},"modified":"2014-09-19T04:32:59","modified_gmt":"2014-09-19T04:32:59","slug":"learn-to-show-off-a-little","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/learn-to-show-off-a-little\/","title":{"rendered":"Learn To Show Off A Little"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you feel like you’re showing off a little bit when you take a solo? If not, you might want to re-think that a little and here’s why…<\/p>\n

If you look at a 12 bar blues progression… you get something like this:<\/p>\n

\"A7<\/p>\n

Notice that at the top, there are 4 bars of the same chord (the I chord.) I put this in the key of A, so in this case it’s A7 all the way through the first 4 bars.<\/p>\n

That means that when it comes time to change to the IV chord, the D7, your listener has gotten a little weary because nothing has really changed and when that change happens it’s going to be kind of a big deal.<\/p>\n

And your job as the soloist is to show the listener that you not only know the chord has changed, but to try and lead your listener to that new chord change… and the better you do that, the more you will sound like you know what you’re doing.<\/p>\n

If you take a look at Solo 1 from Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a> and look at the tab you’ll notice that in every case when the chords change, the note that happens on that beat where the chord changes is a chord tone… it’s the root, 3rd or b3rd (you can get away with the flat 3 because it’s the blues) or the flat 7th.<\/p>\n

Well it doesn’t take much thinking to realize that if a lick is designed to accentuate the D7 chord, and you put it over the A7 chord, something is probably going to have to change. It may not, but it often will.<\/p>\n

But what’s important to note is that while none of those licks would sound wrong at pretty much any time… they would not necessarily sound right unless they match up the same way.<\/p>\n

So let’s say you took a swing blues in C instead of Solo 1’s straight feel in A. You can move everything up 3 frets and play it in a swing exactly as written and it’ll sound perfect (give it a try, really!)<\/p>\n

But if you were to try and mix up the licks with some others (the ones from solo 3 are some of my favorite) you would want to make sure to keep things in roughly the same place or they may not fit very well.<\/p>\n

In other words, a lick from Solo 3 that comes in bar 4 going into bar 5 (where the I goes to the IV chord) probably won’t work so well in bar 8 going into bar 9 (where the I chord goes to the V chord.) Nor would it really work in bar 12 going back to the top where the V chord returns to I.<\/p>\n

And in fact, a lick that comes in bar 4 going to bar 5 probably isn’t going to sound that great anywhere except that one spot without some “massaging of the notes” because no other place in the progression has that same chord movement.<\/p>\n

So your assignment is to take Solo 1 if you don’t know it already, and change it to the key of C and play it over a swing blues feel. If you don’t have any jam tracks<\/a> I know where you can get some \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you feel like you’re showing off a little bit when you take a solo? If not, you might want to re-think that a little and here’s why… If you look at a 12 bar blues progression… you get something like this: Notice that at the top, there are 4 bars of the same chord […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6361"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6361"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6363,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6361\/revisions\/6363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}