{"id":7054,"date":"2017-04-12T09:26:25","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T16:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=7054"},"modified":"2017-04-12T09:26:25","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T16:26:25","slug":"when-all-else-fails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/when-all-else-fails\/","title":{"rendered":"When All Else Fails…"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since I’ve written a new article for you, and as you may know I’ve recently returned from Lake Arrowhead for the annual Blues Guitar Unleashed Live event.<\/p>\n

What’s always interesting to me is how at each event I notice a common theme… a similar thing that the players seem to struggle with. And with this being the 7th(!) one of these events, I’m encouraged by how the “theme” seems to push forward bit by bit.<\/p>\n

\"I
I can neither confirm nor deny reports of time spent in the Lake Arrowhead Resort bar after the jams…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This year I saw quite a few players try to “drop in” solos from one of my courses – which is perfect (that’s what they are for, after all!)<\/p>\n

For some folks it was Solo 2 from Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a> over “The Thrill Is Gone,” for some it was Solo 1 from 5 Easy Blues Solos<\/a> over “Further On Up The Road.”<\/p>\n

Some of the guys that were are little more experienced even went for Solo 4 from Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a> over “Stormy Monday” or some other slow blues in G (and they\u00a0did a pretty fine job of it too!)<\/p>\n

Now, you probably know that I believe it’s important to learn complete solos from start to finish – you should at least know a few of them. Learning complete solos gives you something to use in those situations and helps to show you the thousands of intangible little things about learning to play the blues. Things like phrasing, and melodic flow, and what I call the “story form” of your solos… among other things.<\/p>\n

But… what happens when you make a mistake or get tripped up in the middle of your solo and get lost?<\/p>\n

This is where you ability to improvise comes into play. By also knowing scales and maybe some theory, along with some classic blues licks that will work in most any situation, even if your solo doesn’t go as planned, you can probably still come up with something that will get you by for now.<\/p>\n

In modern cars it’s what I call the “limp home mode,” where something is wrong but the car runs at least enough to get you home. All the dashboard lights are on, it’s sputtering, and it’s only going 30 miles per hour… but it’ll get you that last few miles to your house or the service station.<\/p>\n

So when you’re practicing your solo that you’re going to drop in to a tune, think about how you’ll handle having to bail at any point in that solo.<\/p>\n

Would you go to box 1 and use some licks there?<\/p>\n

Would you go to the house pattern and try to make something happen there?<\/p>\n

Do you have a few licks that you play all the time that you can use when things go wrong?<\/p>\n

If not, that tells you that you might want to get some… and you probably want to spend at least 20% of your time just “winging it” over the tune you plan to play.<\/p>\n

Because I think most of the folks will tell you that once you get on stage, the likelihood that it will go as you planned is about .0000000000013%. So you’ll want to give yourself a good chance of hanging in there when things go south \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since I’ve written a new article for you, and as you may know I’ve recently returned from Lake Arrowhead for the annual Blues Guitar Unleashed Live event. What’s always interesting to me is how at each event I notice a common theme… a similar thing that the players seem to struggle […]<\/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":[10,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7054"}],"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=7054"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7058,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7054\/revisions\/7058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}