Hi I'm Nate Savage and welcome to video #11 of the Blues Guitar Quick-Start Series.
If you're just jumping in on this lesson for this series, I really recommend going back
to the very first lesson and learning everything that we've taught so far because this lesson
is kind of the culmination of all we've gone over.
We're going to take the dressed up standard 12-bar blues riff that we learned and learn
how to interject some lead licks into it. This is a really valuable skill to kind of
develop whether you're playing just blues by yourself, if you're playing in a band situation
or if you're accompanying a singer, being able to play a riff through the 12-bar blues
and interject a couple of the lead licks here and there is a really a great skill to have.
With that in mind, if you have learned the dressed up 12-bar blues riff that we learned
back in lesson #5, I would really recommend that you go and get that down really well
because this is the foundation of everything that we're going to be playing here.
If you have been following me throughout this entire series, let me just give you a quick
refresher of what the dressed up 12-bar blues riff sounds like.
So that sounds awesome but we can make it sound even better by throwing in some lead
licks here and there. So, let me just encourage you, if you don't have this down yet, practice
it until you can play through it spotlessly. Now, the first thing that we need to talk
about is where you should interject your lead licks in a standard 12-bar blues. And this
is going to be affected by who's playing with you or like the context you're playing your
blues in. So, if you, you're playing this standard 12-bar blues with a singer, you don't
want to walk over the singer when they're singing, right? That, it’s just doesn't
go well together. You want to kind of put your licks in the holes with the singer's
not playing. And typically, what you can hand up doing is dividing the 12-bar blues up into
three, four-bar phrases. And if you do that, what's going to end up
happening usually is the first two or three bars, another instrument or the singer will
be singing or playing and you can use the last bar of the four-bar phrase to do a little
lead lick over or maybe the last two bars. It really depends on the situation. What we're
going to do here is divide this up into three four-bar phrases like I said. And for the
first two four-bar phrases, we're going to fill on the last bar. So on bars four and
eight, we're going to do a fill. Now, on the last four-bar phrase we have a
turnaround lick that's going to be over bars eleven and twelve. So, if you already know
this dressed up 12-bar blues riff that we've been talking about, you're going to play the
first three bars exactly like you normally would. And I stopped on the one of the fourth bar there
and this is where you going to put in your first lead lick. So, we hit that first power
chord at the beginning of bar four. Now I need to learn the lick. What we're going to
do is come to the 2nd fret of the G string with your middle finger. Bend that note up
a half-step and then play the open B string and then the open E string. So you have kind
of three down strokes in a row or you can do down up down. That's really up to you.
From there, you are going to go back to the 2nd fret of the G string. Play that note,
then pull off to the open G string. After that, play the 2nd fret of the D string, that
E note, that root note. Open D string and then back to that E root note again. So it’s
perfect, it's emphasizing the I chord, right? 1, 2, 3, 4.
So that's your first lick. Let me let you hear what that sounds like playing the entire
first four bars of the 12-bar blues.
From there, you're going to go to the IV chord and the riff over the IV chord doesn't change at all over these two bars. You’re going to play that just
as you normally would. Now for measure seven and eight, we're going
to move back to the I chord. Measure seven is the exact same normal riff that you'd normally
do. Now for measure eight, you're going to hit that down beat again and we have another
lead right there we're going to throw. You're going to start off by taking your third finger
on the 3rd fret of the B string and you're going to slide that note up to the 5th fret.
But you're going to play the B and the E strings, high E string the same time with the one strum.
So get that slide down and once you slide up you going to hit it two more times for
a total of three times. From there, come play the 2nd fret of the
G string and then pull off to the open G string. Play the 2nd fret of the D string and then
the 2nd fret of the G string and the 3rd fret of the G string with your middle finger.
And that's the entire lick. From there, you’re going to go to a B chord, the V chord and
the riff doesn't change here at all. It's normal. Go to the IV chord, the A, same thing,
the riff doesn't change here at all. And that brings us to measure eleven and twelve, the
I and the V chord, or the two measures that we're going to throw out turnaround lick in.
And if you gone through this whole series and you went through the turnaround licks
lesson, you should know this lick already 'cause we went over there.
Start by hitting a strong down beat with an E power chord and then you're going to put
your third finger on the 3rd fret of the G string, fourth finger on the 3rd fret of the
high E string and that's you're starting point.You're going to slide from those notes right up to the 4th
fret. Both of those notes we're going to go for the 3rd fret to the 4th fret and I grab
those notes, one for my pick and one with my second finger here. So once you hit that,
you have 2 swung eighth notes, move that shape down to the 3rd fret of both of those fingers
are on 3rd fret. 2 more swung eighth notes down to the 2nd fret, 2 more.
And from there, you’re going to have this B7 chord that we went over in that same turnaround licks
lesson. And you're going to basically strum down to the A string, D string, G string, and
then one big strum to the high B and E strings. So altogether really slowly.
And one thing that helps me when I reach that point, I just leave those two fingers there
and come complete the rest of this B7 shape with your first finger on the first fret of
the D string and your second finger on the 2nd fret of the A string. That way you're
ready, half of that shape is already in place. So that's the whole dressed up 12-bar blues
riff with three licks thrown in there. And hopefully, you're starting to see the idea
of how you can keep a blues riff going whatever that blues riff maybe and start throwing in
some nice lead licks. I’m going to lay here with these things sounds like altogether with
the jam track now.
It's really important that you practice this kind of stuff to steady beat so you can kind of start to develop your internal clock, whether
that's a metronome or the jam tracks available to you here. It doesn't matter, so long as
you're practicing to some kind of steady beat. I know this has been a lot of work but be
encouraged. You've come a long way just since the beginning of this series. And working
on stuff like this is going to not only improve your rhythm blues guitar vocabulary but your
lead blues guitar vocabulary as well. In the next lesson, we're going to take a
look at what you need to do to continue your blues guitar education and your blues guitar
journey. So get ready for that. If you have any questions, you can leave them here in
the comments; I'll get back to you or just e-mail me nate@guitarsystem.com. See you later.