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Improvisation -blues part 1Improvisation This section is mainly for those with electric guitars, but acoustic guitarists can read on too! Imagine you are playing in Billy Ray Cyrus' band (our dream, i know!), and he needs a break. The crowd is getting restless. The bassist and drummer are laying down a solid blues foundation. Everyone is expecting you to come out with a beautiful improvisation. And what do you do? You panic, not knowing what to do. You pick a few random notes on the guitar but nothing seems to sound right, and you wonder how those greats like BB King did their stuff. Fortunately, there is no magic involved here. What you see is the work of scales. Those great guitarists spent hours upon hours practising these scales over and over again, so as to produce that awesome solo. What scale are you talking about? The blues scale. Get your guitar out, and lets go to the 5th fret of the 6th string. Play this, ----5--8------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What you just played is called the Blues scale. It's basically the pentatonic scale with a 2 extra notes added. Practice this over and over again, in different ways, quickly, slowly, with hammer ons and pull offs, skip strings etc. You may feel that this is NOTHING like improvising, but it is the essential first step! Of course, just because you learnt the blues scale, doesn't mean you're now an excellent improviser. Not at all. In fact, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Any guitarist can learn a scale. The scale is just to show you the notes you can play in that particular key. The real trick is making actual music out of it! This is the first part of a three part Blues improvisation lesson. In the next article, we will cover how we can music out of this scale. Happy practising!
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