Add Jazz Flavors to the 12-bar Blues Like

The blues is of central importance to American tune. With out the earthy style that emerged all the device in which thru the 1860s, you wouldn’t rating jazz, rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, and so many styles and variations. Jazz and the blues lumber hand in hand; feeble blues guitarists enrich their taking half in with jazz vocabulary, while jazz guitarists expend the feel and ease of the blues to add emotion and grit to their taking half in.

In this lesson, we’ll detect the interplay between the two styles—more specifically the style you would possibly per chance per chance additionally boost the blues with a range of jazz substances, beginning simply and progressing to more evolved ideas derived from bebop. The examples are consistent with the classic 12-bar blues development fashionable to both blues and jazz. To originate the plenty of the lesson, try transposing the examples to other keys and memorizing among the crucial licks to rating at your disposal to your dangle soloing.

Week One

Let’s birth up off by exploring the 12-bar blues within the fashionable guitar key of E fundamental, which helps you to originate ideal expend of the originate strings, as confirmed in Example 1. This resolve sticks to the E minor pentatonic scale (E G A B D) scale in originate spot in bars 1–4, transferring to the E blues scale (E G A Bb B D) in bars 5–8.

Display how in every two-bar section, an ascending line is answered by a descending one. This device of call and response is fashionable to blues and jazz. And while the fundamental eight bars are silent of eighth notes, bars 9–10 add some triplets for rhythmic variation.

Play this resolve—and all the others—with a swing feel. Swing would possibly per chance per chance well also even be extremely non-public and complex to quantify, nevertheless normally play every pair of eighth notes no longer evenly as written nevertheless lengthy-immediate. Basically the simplest technique to originate a genuine sense of swing is to play along with other recordings or master musicians.

It additionally will doubtless be a reliable suggestion to seem at out Ex. 1 in other fretboard positions—indulge in V, as an illustration, with plenty of the notes falling around frets 5–8 (as antagonistic to for the third-worry G). To originate the transition from blues to jazz you’ll make a selection to rating the flexibility to visualise and play notes everywhere the fretboard.

Beginners’ Tip #1
Be taught the minor pentatonic (1 b3 4 5 b7) and blues scales (1 b3 4 b5 5 b7) everywhere the fretboard.

That’s the end of Week One.The total lesson substances four weeks of exercises (plus a bonus exercise.) There are two ways to rating entry to the fat video and musical examples:Be half of our team at Patreon.com/acousticguitarplus ORPurchase the July/August 2024 whisper ofAcoustic Guitarmagazine.