There are 2 ways you can approach soloing – by key or by chord.<\/p>\n
In a blues, it’s going to be in a key – and the easiest way to solo is to play the minor pentatonic\/blues sound that goes with that key.<\/p>\n
Doing a blues in A? Play A minor blues.<\/p>\n
Doing a blues in G? Play G minor blues.<\/p>\n
Doing a blues in D? Play D minor blues.<\/p>\n
You get the idea… but what happens if you want to go by chord?<\/p>\n
2 things happen, it gets a lot more interesting (read that as difficult) and the possibilities grow dramatically.<\/p>\n
Over the I chord you can mix the I major and minor blues sounds…<\/p>\n
Over the IV chord you can mix the I minor blues sound, the IV major and IV minor blues sounds…<\/p>\n
While over the V chord you can mix the I minor blues, V Major and V minor blues sounds!<\/p>\n
That’s a total of 8 different sounds instead of 1. So clearly that’s going to liven things up a little \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
But it gets a little more complex even than that… Let’s imagine a blues in A again and let’s think about the IV chord, the D7.<\/p>\n
You should be able to play A minor blues, D major blues, and D minor blues… but if you play D minor blues without adding in D major blues, you probably won’t dig the sound all that much.<\/p>\n
Well, “why not?” you might ask.<\/p>\n
And while there’s no hard and fast reason, I think the simple answer is – because that’s not what people generally do.<\/p>\n
We all tend to dig the sounds that we are used to hearing.. and I can’t think of any blues players that make a habit of playing just the IV minor blues sound of the IV chord… so it’ll probably sound a little weird to you.<\/p>\n
I might be wrong, and maybe you’ll be the first to make it work – but if you’re new to soloing now is not the time to try and stake new territory (if you know what I mean.)<\/p>\n
Instead, focus on really making things sound good the way they are usually done:<\/p>\n
1) Play I minor the whole time<\/p>\n
2) Play I major and minor over the I chord, and I minor over the IV and V chord<\/p>\n
3) Play I major and minor over the I chord, IV major and minor over the IV chord, and V major and minor over the V chord.<\/p>\n
Obviously 1 is the easiest, 2 is a little more involved, and 3 is a little more difficult still (most folks don’t really get to 3 and that’s okay.)<\/p>\n
Most of your heroes played the minor blues almost the whole time and if it worked for them, it probably will work for you. And if it’s not, chances are you don’t need more notes, you need to make better use of the notes you’re using.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are 2 ways you can approach soloing – by key or by chord. In a blues, it’s going to be in a key – and the easiest way to solo is to play the minor pentatonic\/blues sound that goes with that key. Doing a blues in A? Play A minor blues. Doing a blues […]<\/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\/6853"}],"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=6853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6854,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853\/revisions\/6854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}