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Take the Lead
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Ending this lick with a slide from D to E gives us a variation that targets the root of the E7 chord. You’ll need to make a quick jump with your ring finger from the fourth to the third string; it’s OK if the note on the fourth string gets cut a little short at first while you get used to this move. See what this sounds like in measure 9 of Slip and Slide, below, which is a 12-bar blues solo using this lick and ending on either an A, D, or E.
Talk Back: Call-and-Response Licks
Now that you’ve got some licks helping to spell out the chord progression, let’s answer each lick with a contrasting phrase, an approach called call and response. If you look at each line of our Target Practice and Slip and Slide blues—the first four bars, the middle four bars, and the last four bars—you’ll see that the third measure of each line is always the A7 chord, which is the I chord—the chord built on the root note of the selected key. So in the key of A, it will always be safe to land on an A (the root of the I chord) on the downbeat of the third chord of each line. This means that instead of just leaving open space after the first lick of each line, or repeating the same lick twice in each line (as in Slip and Slide), you can answer each root-targeting lick with a new lick, like THE RESPONSE, below, that resolves to A.
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The Response
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ANSWER MY CALL, below, shows how this sounds in a full 12-bar blues.
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Answer My Call
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Start Playing the Blues
The blues is all about making the most of a few ingredients, and as we’ve seen, you only need two licks—a “call” that you can modify to target the different roots and a “response” that targets the root note of the I chord—to make up a cool blues solo of your own. Take the A minor-pentatonic scale, and play around with the scale—skipping notes, moving up and down, etc.—until you find one lick you like. Then use these ideas about root targeting and call and response to cook up some ideas of your own.
Behind the Notes: Play other minor pentatonics
The A minor-pentatonic scale (on page 1) uses a movable scale pattern, which means that you can move that scale pattern up or down the fretboard to play a minor-pentatonic scale in a different key. In the pattern you learned, the first note is the root of the scale (the note the scale is built from).
If you start the scale on G (the third fret of the sixth string), you’ll have a G minor-pentatonic scale, below. To create your own simple solos for “Pride and Joy” (transcribed on page 44 of the Summer issue), you’ll need the E minor-pentatonic scale, so start your scale shape on the open sixth string instead of the third fret.
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