Browsing Archive: August, 2009

The Wicked Brothers of Doom

Posted by The Wizard on Saturday, August 29, 2009, In : Power Blues 101

The Wicked Brothers of Doom

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Using the Harmonic minor to produce the blues sound

Yes, I’m not kidding. Today I’m going to show you how you can use the Harmonic Minor scale to produce some cool blues rock lines. The sound of any scale is deeply influenced by what chords you play with it. This is why your regular C-Major scale has a mode for every note in the scale. The “mode” is really an expression of the sound you get when you play this scale with th...
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Bridging The Blues Scale Shapes

Posted by The Wizard on Sunday, August 23, 2009, In : Power Blues 101

Bridging the blues scale shapes

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From vertical to horizontal

At some point in your development you feel the urge to learn to play using the entire fretboard instead of being locked into one or two positions. The first step to doing this is mastering all 5 of the blues scale shapes. But if this is the only thing you do, you won’t really develop the freedom you want, you’ll still be locked into positions only now there are five and not two of them. To truly go f...
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3 Notes Per String Blues Freedom

Posted by The Wizard on Saturday, August 15, 2009, In : Power Blues 101

3 notes per string blues freedom

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The best of Paul Gilbert

Did you try out Paul Gilbert 3-notes-per-string Blues scale patterns? Then perhaps you’ve also found them difficult to use when playing solos. The 3 notes per string blues scale patterns involves weird stretches and unusual fingerings but it's well worth the effort mastering them. These patterns allow you to use all the sequences and licks that you know from the Major / Minor realm, because you have the same...
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The Diminished Blues Sound

Posted by The Wizzard on Wednesday, August 12, 2009, In : Power Blues 101

The Diminished Blues Sound

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My favorite blues phrasing tool

This is one of my absolute favorites when it comes to blues scale expansion ideas. The concept I'm going to discuss today will make your regular old blues scale sound like a screamin’ demon. I’m talking about the diminished triad which fits very nicely within the blues scale as you can see in the illustration below. Again this is your number one E-blues scales shape with a E-Diminished triad on top of it....
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Sweep Picking Power Blues

Posted by Pure Speed on Friday, August 7, 2009, In : Power Blues 101

Sweep Picking Power Blues

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Dramatic Arpeggios

The blues rock context embodies a whole range of different sounds. You can put almost any scale, arpeggio or lick in there and if you do it right it’ll sound really cool. Today let’s stick an E-minor triad in there and hear how it sounds. I’m going to take a sweep picking approach to this idea. But you can use the notes of the E-Minor triad to produce a lot of interesting sounding slow licks as well. If you’ve been...
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How To Play Melodic Power Blues

Posted by The Wizzard on Wednesday, August 5, 2009, In : Power Blues 101

How to play melodic power blues

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Mixing the blues scale with the Dorian scale

Today’s idea requires a little more work than the two previous ones. I’ve written about this before but here it is again: Mixing the blues scale with the Dorian scale. The Dorian scale is, of course, your regular Major scale but with it’s second note as the root note.

Here’s your number one regular pentatonic / E-Blues shape again:

And here it is with the added E-dorian (Also D-Major...
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The One Minute Major Third Expansion

Posted by Pure Speed on Saturday, August 1, 2009, In : Power Blues 101

The one minute major third expansion

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Using every available note on the fretboard

I hope you had fun with the idea and the licks in my last article. Today I’m going to expand a bit on that same simple idea. But before I go on I would like to make this clear: You can use all available notes on the entire fretboard to play over any Blues Rock chord progression, and when you come to the end of these articles, you will! So the point of these article is not to show you...