Guitar For Dummies by Mark Phillips & Jon Chappell

Author:Mark Phillips & Jon Chappell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119153085
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

Blues lead guitar

Blues lead is the single-note melodic line, consisting of a mixture of composed lines and improvised phrases. A great lead solo includes both these elements in one seamless, inspired whole. The following sections provide you with the tools and techniques you need to create your own bluesy-sounding licks and solos.

Beginning with boxes

Blues guitarists improvise mostly by using boxes — just as rock guitarists do. A box is a fingerboard pattern — usually outlining a pentatonic minor scale — that vaguely resembles the shape of a box. (See Chapter 11 for info on pentatonic minor scales and boxes.) By using notes in a box, you can improvise lead lines that automatically sound good as you play them over a 12-bar blues accompaniment.

You may already know how to use boxes to play rock ’n’ roll lead guitar, which employs the same scales and chords as blues. (And we describe these in Chapter 11.) If so, you should have no trouble understanding the example in Figure 12-4, which shows the three boxes you can use for soloing in the key of A that we introduce in Chapter 11; we circle the notes that are good for bending. (For information on bending, see Chapter 10.)

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Figure 12-4: Grid diagrams for Boxes I, II, and III.

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