Blues soloing is deceptively simple, yet so effective. All you really need to start is the minor pentatonic scale, and the beauty of it is that it sounds great over all the basic chords of a blues or blues rock progression. But just running up and down the scale won’t cut it. Because the ingredients are so simple, how you use those few notes makes all the difference in blues soloing.
In this lesson, we’re going to focus on some key aspects of blues soloing, including building simple phrases around the root of the scale, call-and-response phrasing, sliding into notes, targeting the roots of the IV and V chords, and comparing phrases that start on the downbeat and those that begin with a pickup into the downbeat.
Let’s start with the iconic minor pentatonic scale. Example 1 shows the basic fingering at the 5th fret. This is a movable scale form, and wherever you move it on the fretboard, it becomes the minor pentatonic scale of that key. For now, we’ll be working in A, but you can apply these concepts to any key by shifting the scale to another position on the fretboard.
Example 1 covers just over 2 octaves of the scale, with only 5 notes in the scale, as the name suggests. The 5 notes are the root, b3, 4, 5, and b7. Starting on the seventh-fret A, you can move 2 notes to get the b3 and the 4 of the scale, and down 2 notes to get the b7 and the 5 of the scale. Now, you’ve got the essential sound of the scale covered in one small area of the fretboard.
Now, it’s time to start branching out a bit beyond the zone we’ve been working in.
