MINOR PENTATONIC BLUES: IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO!

The first soloing device most aspiring blues and rock guitar players learn is this minor pentatonic scale, sometimes called the blues box. Here it is in the key of G:

As you probably know, you place this pattern on the fret that corresponds to your key (e.g. the 3^rd fret for the key of G, because the 6^th string/3^rd fret is G). Then you can ad lib licks made up of the notes in that pattern, and you pretty much can’t go wrong…even as the chords are changing…and even if you haven’t a clue what you’re doing. It sounds like the blues, especially if you bend a few notes.

The thing is, the blues box is a gross over-simplification of what the real blues players (B. B. King, Albert King, Freddie King, all them Kings) actually do. They play lots of notes that are not in that box, and their starting point isn’t that pattern…it’s this moveable F formation:

To back up a bit, T-Bone Walker is the main architect of the modern electric blues guitar style. Around 1970 I saw T-Bone get on stage to jam with B. B. King at the Fillmore in San Francisco. B. B. put his arm around T-Bone and told the audience: “This is the guy we got this type of guitar playing from!” It seems to be a pretty accurate statement.

Before electric guitars were circulating, many acoustic blues players lived in the key of E. There’s a vocabulary of E licks that are primal blues licks…listen to Muddy Waters’ “Rolling Stone,” for example, which is his version of  “Catfish Blues,” one of the most primal blues tunes of all time (and the one that gave the Rolling Stones their name). Players like Muddy (once he went electric) and Jimmy Reed, Big Boy Arthur Crudup, 

Gatemouth Brown, Lightning Hopkins and many others favored the key of E, and if they wanted to sing in a different key, they’d capo up several frets so they could still play their key-of-E licks.

T-Bone figured out how to make those E licks moveable. Since F is just an E chord up one fret, you can play the E licks in the key of F by moving them up one fret (check out the accompanying youtube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LTOA07A8T4):

Since the F versions of those E blues clichés use no open strings, they can be played in any key. Voila, modern electric blues. Well…not quite. In any key, you can play the blues out of four positions. The F formation is the basis of the first position, and the other three go higher and higher up the fretboard. But it all starts with that first position. To make good use of it, you need to develop a vocabulary of licks that spring from the F position, like the ones you already looked at (above). Here are a few more. To play them, keep your fretting hand hovering around that F formation. You don’t fret it constantly, but you keep coming back to it (the youtube video of these licks is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBFq5LLVFn4):

The blues is a language, and those licks are like words. When you learned to speak your native language, you imitated the sounds made by all the people around you…learning how to physically make the sounds while learning what they meant. That’s how you learn to play the blues: you have to imitate the phrases and licks the blues masters play. Listen to the three Kings, and to Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Lowell Fulson, T-Bone…they perfected this language. Eventually you have a vocabulary of licks, and you can string them together in a way that says something. Instrumental music is non verbal but at its best it expresses feelings and emotions. Once you have a big enough vocabulary of blues licks, you can do that too. That’s when it becomes really fun and liberating to play the blues.

I wrote a book called Classic Blues Licks For Electric Guitar that has 177 licks, played on sound files that are free to download, and written out in tab & music. They're categorized in groups such as: First Position Key-of-E Licks, First Blues Box, Fourth Blues Box, Chord/Rhythm Licks, Bass/Boogie Figures and much more. Each lick is repeated several times on the recording, with band accompaniment. Practice tracks included…you can get it off my website: sokolowmusic.com.

I also have a FREE book (you pay $3 shipping) called Basic Blues that has a lot of instruction and tunes and exercises in acoustic and electric blues. It includes several good examples of modern electric blues playing in all four positions…also available from sokolowmusic.com.

If you have any questions about this subject, please feel free to email me at sokolowmusic@gmail.com.