Members Terje Posted March 18, 2007 Members Posted March 18, 2007 I've presented this idea before but sine I've started to really use it myself and really started to like it a lot I'll repeat it. One fothe worst things you hear when you hear not so great blues players take a solo is that we noodle around. I can't think of one single chorus of noodling caught on tape with anyone of my blues guitar heroes! T-Bone didn't do it. BB King doesn't do it. We shouldn't do it either, I guess. One way of getting away from that is to have something as a basis for your solo, instead of just running all the blues licks you know. Some players, like for instance T-Bone, had a distinct vocabulary that they used and never really deviated from. That can become boring and the example we all think about is probably Elmore James, or for that matter Chuck Berry. Another approach, and that's the one I'm about to recommend, isto use a classical blues melody as the basis of your solo. If it also happens to be the melody of the tune you're soloing on then all the better but if not it'll work anyway. So, let's take a melody... let's say From Four Until Late. Learn Robert Johnson's vocal melody on your guitar, learn it in at least two octaves. Learn it in moveable patterns so you can now play it in all 12 keys. This shouldn't be so hard. Keep playing it often though so you get really comfortable with it and eventually get to the point where you simply couldn't play it wrong even if you tried. By now it'll be easy to start to improvise on this melody! The rest is easy. Next time you're taking a solo in a blues tune you can use this melody as your springboard. If it is a medium tempo or fast tune then this is all you have to use. Play as if you were the singer. Play the phrases of the melody, improvise with it, but take pauses between the phrases like a singer would. If the song is slow it's a little more tricky and if you only play the melody phrases you're likely to do the mistake of ending your phrases on a long note that just hangs there. So be both the singer and the guitarist! Play your improvised melody lines and between them you can play your favorite blues licks, as if you were the guitarist filling in between the vocal lines. I steal melodies from Bessis Smith mostly, or from singer from that era. Lots of really great bluesmelodies, real classics, came from that time. I interject T-Boneish fills between the melody lines if it's a slow blues. It's a no-brainer by then. No matter what you do it'll sound pretty damn good.
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