Blues Guitar Lessons - Applied Theory in Depth

Welcome to our Blues Guitar Lessons

The blues, as the blood and life of jazz, rock, funk, country and so many other genres, warrants in-depth study.

Melodically speaking, classical blues uses mainly the blues scale, which is an altered form of the minor pentatonic scale.

The minor pentatonic scale is composed of: R, m3, 4, 5, m7.
The blues scale adds the blue note, 4+, so we have:R, m3, 4, 4+, 5, m7.

Now, if we use this scale as our source for melody, with regular blues changes as comping, we are playing over changes, which means we don't really care what the chords do -we just stick to that scale.

A more sophisticated way of improvising over blues changes, or any changes, is to play thru changes, which means we adapt to the chords and play "inside".

Once we have mastered this, we can start playing outside. This might sound a little random, but doing it properly actually takes lots of study.

The basic blues changes use only 3 chords, and they are all of the same chord quality. They are major triads with a minor 7th on top. This kind of 7th chord is often called a dominant chord, but the word dominant is best used to describe for the dominant function: an M chord, or M7 chord resolving a 4th upwards or a 5th downwards.

So the blues uses I7, IV7 and V7. The root scale of this chord type is the mixolydian mode, so we can play thru changes by playing mixolidian on I, IV and V.
For example: If our blues is in G, we play G mixolydian (=C Major) for our G7, C mixolydian for our C7, and D mixolydian for our D7.
To simplify matters, we can say that C mixolydian is the same as G dorian; and that D mixolydian is the same as G ionian. So we can stay in G all the time, simply adjusting as the changes ask.

Later we can combine playing over changes and thru changes for contrast.