{"id":6721,"date":"2015-09-18T20:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-09-19T03:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=6721"},"modified":"2015-09-19T00:26:26","modified_gmt":"2015-09-19T07:26:26","slug":"i-guarantee-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/i-guarantee-it\/","title":{"rendered":"I Guarantee It…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of guarantees in the world that are worth much anymore…<\/p>\n

So one thing I work hard at is keeping things organized in such a way that you start with things that are “guaranteed to work.”<\/p>\n

Even something as simple as soloing with the blues scale, or the 4 Note Solo pattern, is guaranteed to work because there are no notes that can be wrong. So if you play only those notes at any point in a blues progression, you will never sound wrong or out of key (assuming you start in the right place…)<\/p>\n

And then there are things like my “blues rules<\/a>,” and a good example is\u00a0never starting a lick on beat 1…<\/p>\n

Does that mean you really can never start a lick on beat 1? Of course not! BB King does it at the top of “The Thrill Is Gone” and it kills<\/em>… but that’s BB King \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

What it really means is that, by and large, most licks you hear from great guitar players in your life don’t start on beat 1 (and there’s a whole historical context of work songs behind why that is) and so you’re used to hearing licks played that way – you’ve come to expect it.<\/p>\n

And a lot of what we perceive as success (or in this case, sounding good) has to do with meeting our own expectations. So if you play a lick and it sounds like what you expect, you’re probably going to like it!<\/p>\n

So since you mostly hear that sound of playing off beat 1, that’s what will sound good to you every time. Playing on beat 1 might sound good to you if you do it right, but it might sound lousy so it’s not guaranteed<\/em> to work.<\/p>\n

As you get better and more sophisticated in your playing, starting on beat 1 may make sense at times and you’ll know how to handle it and make<\/em> it sound good.<\/p>\n

But for now, especially if you’re new to soloing in general, stick to the guaranteed path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of guarantees in the world that are worth much anymore… So one thing I work hard at is keeping things organized in such a way that you start with things that are “guaranteed to work.” Even something as simple as soloing with the blues scale, or the 4 […]<\/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\/6721"}],"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=6721"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6725,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6721\/revisions\/6725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}