Hey it's Nate here again and welcome to video #9 of the Blues Guitar Quick-Start Series.
So far for your lead guitar, your lead blues guitar, we've been talking about the blues
scale, where the root notes are, how to start choosing your notes in the blues scale to
play over the chords in the 12-bar blues progression. Now, in this lesson, we're going to focus
a bit more on feeling and the style. We're going to talk about phrasing, bending, vibrato
and sliding. These elements can really add a new level of self-expression and emotion
to your guitar playing. So what we're going to do is talk about each one in turn, and
I'm going to show you how you can apply them to your blues solos to make them better.
The first thing I want to talk to you about is phrasing and when I talked about phrasing
I almost always think about two things. I think about blues singers and I think about
call and answer themes. When you're playing a blues solo, you don't want to sound like
you're just playing through a scale shape. That's the last thing you want. So one way
to think about making your stuff not sound like that is to think about blues singers.
If you haven’t listen to match blues music, I'll recommend is go and listen to some singers
especially for their phrasing. They state something. If they have something to say then
you take a break or something and then they have another line that they say. That's kind
of the way you want it, in general the way you want to think about your blues solos,
right? And sometimes that goes kind of hand in hand with that as far as the blues phrasing
of blues singers, right? Is repeated themes. If I start a blues solo and state a theme,
I'll take a break for a couple of beats or whatever and then restate the theme. That
does a couple of things – that breaks my phrasing up and makes it more natural. And
it gives my solo some cohesiveness. So, here's an example if I played this lick.
I can play it, wait a few seconds and then state it again, maybe end it a little differently.
So, think about those two things next time you pull up a jam track to practice your blues
leads. Break up your phrasing a little bit. Make a sound more like a singer, right? And
then have a stated theme that you call and then answer to.
Now, let's talk about bending a little bit as far as a self-expressive tool in the blues.
Bending can be a huge part of your sound and it's kind of a sound that we've come to expect
in the blues, right? You just expect to hear that whining sound and bending in the blues
can be half-step bends, whole-step bends, or even further. The important thing is that
you realized that bending is a tool at your disposal to make your playing your sound more
bluesy. Now to help you realized that I'm got a lot of licks here for you then incorporate
some bends. This first lick is really heavily emphasizing
the root note of the I chord if you’re in E blues. So we really heavily emphasizing
the E note. So take your third finger on the 3rd fret of the B string and we're going to
bend that note up. That D note, a whole-step towards an E. And then we're going to play
an open E and then we're going to come back here and play the 2nd fret of the D string.
So we're hitting really three E notes bending up to one, then hitting the open E, then the
second fret of the D string. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and.
And one tip I want to give you for that lick is when you're bending a whole-step especially
or whole-step or greater you want to use this many fingers to come help out with the bend
as possible. That way it makes easier on the finger that you're bending with.
Alright this next little bending lick starts on the 4 and bends up to the flat 5. It’s
basically a half-step bend where I bend that note up and let it back down. And then I’ll
play the open G string. Come down to the 2nd fret of the A string, second finger, and then
open D string, 2nd fret of the D string to end up on your root note. So this is kind
of emphasizing the I chord too. The tip I want to give you for this bending
lick is just to double check your bend, so if you're bending up a half-step here, double
check that half-step bend against the actual fretted note that’s one fret higher.
It's always good to double check your bends. The next element that I want to talk to you
about is vibrato. Vibrato is a very self-expressive tool that you can use to really kind of give
your solos their own unique sounds. At its most basic level, vibrato is just bending
and hold up and letting you back down over and over again, so. And there are two different
elements that you can use to kind of customize your vibrato to convey whatever emotion or
feeling you’re trying to get out to your blue solos. The first one is the speed of
your vibrato. It can be slow or can be fast, it’s just depends on what you want to convey
at that particular time. So work on slow and fast vibrato that way when you need either
of them, they'd be right there for your grab. The second element of vibrato that I want
to talk to you about is the width of your vibrato, you can have really shallow vibrato
where it's barely noticeable. Or you can have really wide vibrato to where it's really noticeable.
Experiment with both of them, see what you come up with and try to develop your own unique
voice with your vibrato. Again, I like to think about singers, they have a really distinct
way of using the vibrato that we guitar players can kind of pull from.
Sliding is another stylistic little element that can really add some unique flavor to
your playing. And by sliding all I mean starting on one note, and sliding up to another note
or starting on one note and sliding down to another note. And depending on which note
you choose to start on and which note you choose to slide up to again have some pretty
drastic effects. It can give some really bluesy or jazzy sounds to your playing. So, to help
you understand this, I'm going to show you two blues licks that achieve a very specific
sound. One is sliding up to the flat 5 and the other one is sliding up from the flatted
third to the regular third. I'll show you what I mean.
This first lick starts on the 4th of the blues scale and slides up to the flat 5. And sliding
up to the flat 5 or down to it either way can be really bluesy sounding, so, remember
that. Let me show you the lick now. On the tab, you're going to see a three with
a slash on it, that's just mean you're going to slide up to the 3rd fret and I'm going
to do that from the 2nd fret. Then you're going to go to the open G string and then to the
2nd fret of the G string. So, so far you have...from there you going to hit the open D, 2nd fret
of the D, open G, you have a rest there and then back to the root note of the I chord.
The E right there on the 2nd fret of the D string. So practice that lick and then just
practice sliding up and down to the flat 5 note. And it's going to sound really bluesy
for you. This next sliding lick is going to show you
how you can slide up from the flat third of the blues scale up to the regular major third
of what would be like in a major scale. So, start off on the 3rd fret of the high E string,
that's the third, lower third of the blues scale. Play that note and on the tab you're
going to see that there's a slash on the four that means you're going to slide up to the
fourth fret from the fret below it. So that's your first note. Slide it up for the flat
third to the regular third and this can give you a really jazzy sound just in general.
After that slide, play the open high E string and then the 3rd fret of the E string. Again,
back to the open E string, down to the open B string, 3rd fret of the B string, open E
string. Then you're going to go to the root note of the scale, the 2nd fret of the D string
right there, that E note. 1, 2, 3, 4.
So play around with those two sliding ideas. Slide up or down to the flat 5 and then slide up from a flat third to the major third and see
what you can come up with. Those are just a few little stylistic tools
that you can really start to use to learn how to express yourself better on the guitar.
Take each one, think about them, experiment with them, pull up the jam tracks and see
what you can come up with. Here's a little pass between the jam tracks then incorporates all these things
Spend part of your daily practice with these little self-expressive tools and see what kind of unique things you can start to come up with.
In the next lesson, we're going to talk about
a type of lick called a turnaround lick. So, get ready for that. If you have any questions,
you can leave them here in the comments and I'll get back to you there or you can e-mail
me nate@guitarsystem.com. See you.