This Beginner's Guide to Guitar Soloing™ is brought to you by the following sponsors:
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12 Bar Blues Continued...
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Now that you have a basic idea of how to improvise over chords, let's expand on the previous
lesson by playing scales to fit each individual chord rather than one scale to fit the key.
Again, we'll use the 12 Bar Blues.
Keep in mind that you are not limited to any single approach in a solo. You can move freely
from the key center approach from the previous page to the chordal approach we'll be
exploring here. These are just a few of the many, many tools available to the improvising
musician.
For variety, we'll change keys to A major. Here's the chord progression.
Previousely, we used the Minor Pentatonic scale as a blues scale to play over this
section. We can create a different sound by playing the major pentatonic scale.
Do this by placing your fourth finger on the fifth fret and playing the same pattern. In
other words slide 4 frets toward the headstock.
This scale will work over all of the chords and may be interchanged with the minor pentatonic
scale we used over the G blues (up 2 frets, of course). But, sometimes it is more
interesting to change scales when the chord changes. So, when the chord progression moves
from Amaj to Dmaj, we can also change scales from A major pentatonic to D major pentatonic.
Do this by sliding the scale pattern up the fingerboard until your fourth finger rests on
the note D on the sixth string (10th. fret). Finally, for E7 we'll use the same scale
pattern from E at the 12th fret.
So far, we've learned how to solo over a Blues Chord Progression using the major or minor
pentatonic scale throughout all of the chords and to use individual scales for each chord.
This is just a tiny introduction to improvisation. There are countless scales and chords
which interact in a dizzying range of ways. In upcoming lessons, we'll dig deeply into
the many ways to approach your solos.
Return to Introduction to Improvisation/Soloing for Guitar.
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