In blues soloing we talk about mixing the major and minor blues sounds (or scales, same thing) to get some cool ideas going…<\/p>\n
And there’s a common tactic I call, “the 3 fret rule” where if you take a minor pentatonic or blues scale, and slide it down 3 frets, it becomes the major pentatonic or blues scale.<\/p>\n
In other words, let’s say you play A minor blues (box 1 on A) and then slide it down 3 frets and play it… now it’s F# minor blues, which is the same as A major blues. They are relative.<\/p>\n
This is a trick that, yes, always works… and in my experience also never fails to produce results that are… not so good.<\/p>\n
Here’s why: when you play a blues in A, you’re thinking about A because that’s the tonal center. When you play in F#, you are thinking about F# because that’s the tonal center.<\/p>\n
So when you’re in A, but you’re thinking in F#, you tend to gravitate to F# and not to A… and as you can imagine that’s less than desirable.<\/p>\n
Well one of my younger students recently had the misfortune of attending a sort of “workshop” with his high school jazz band. Luckily, one of the workshop instructors was a jazz guitarist who actually studied guitar and plays it well – and that’s super unusual because usually these things are run by horn players and guitars get hung out until it’s time for the whole band to play.<\/p>\n
And guess what this guy told my student to do… move the blues scale down 3 frets and play it there. Never mind the fact that I’ve seen hundreds of students over the years make a mess with that trick and never mind that my student already knew how to play the major blues sound and already knew how to mix the major and minor blues sounds.<\/p>\n
Please don’t learn A major as F# minor, just don’t. On the bandstand you’ll never have enough brain power to do the mental gymnastics involved to move 3 frets and still remember what key you’re supposed to be in. I have yet to see that trick work well… certainly not as well as learning the major blues sound from the right root.<\/p>\n
And that’s all… rant over… carry on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In blues soloing we talk about mixing the major and minor blues sounds (or scales, same thing) to get some cool ideas going… And there’s a common tactic I call, “the 3 fret rule” where if you take a minor pentatonic or blues scale, and slide it down 3 frets, it becomes the major pentatonic […]<\/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\/6855"}],"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=6855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6856,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6855\/revisions\/6856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}