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Lead Licks
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By David Hamburger
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Turn one simple scale into a blues solo that rocks
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Tune up
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If you’ve been strumming your guitar for a while (even a short while) but have visions of taking triumphant guitar solos, it’s time to take a stab at playing lead guitar, and the best place to get started is with the blues. Play a track by anyone from B.B. King, Chuck Berry, or T-Bone Walker to Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, or, more recently, Robben Ford, Sue Foley, or Jonny Lang, and chances are good you’ll be grooving on some kind of 12-bar blues. And since countless tunes in other genres—especially rock—are based on the 12-bar blues, once you work through this lesson, you’ll be able to jam on a whole lot of other songs as well. In this lesson, we’ll get acquainted with some of the essentials of blues soloing, starting with a brief survey of the terrain.
All songs have a form, the particular order of the song’s various sections, such as the intro, verse, chorus, and so on. Each section is in turn made up of a series of chords played in a particular order: a chord progression. The 12-bar blues is one of the simplest of all forms because a whole song consists entirely of one 12-bar (or 12-measure) progression repeated for the length of the song. We’ll be working on blues leads in the key of A, so here’s the basic form, below.
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12-bar blues
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Minor-Pentatonic Scale
Playing lead guitar means understanding the relationship between the chords in a song and the single-note, scale-based licks, or short melodic fragments, played over those chords. Blues lead guitar draws on a variety of influences and sounds, but by far the most important ingredient is the minor-pentatonic scale, and almost everyone’s first experiences with lead guitar start here. Like the name suggests—at least to those fluent in Latin, in which “penta” means “five” and “tonic” means “note”—the pentatonic scale is a five-note scale.
A major scale, the “do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do” which you may dimly remember from elementary-school music classes or your last viewing of The Sound of Music, has seven notes.
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A-major scale
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The minor-pentatonic scale uses the first, fourth, and fifth notes from the major scale but flats (lowers by one fret, or a half-step) the third and seventh notes. These flatted notes give the minor-pentatonic scale its bluesy feel.
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A minor-pentatonic scale
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Spend a little time playing the minor-pentatonic scale, and you’ll probably be able to move your fingers through all the right notes, from the bottom or the top. Spend a little more time, and you may find yourself thinking, “Hey, wait a second. I just sound like someone playing through a scale thingy. Where are the cool licks I sent for?”
It’s from such perceptive and highly justifiable outrage that true enlightenment springs—theoretically, anyway. Fact is, those cool licks are lurking within these scales, but when you play a scale up or down in order, it can’t help but sound like a scale. The trick is to pull the scale apart, pick a few essential notes to work with, and focus on how you use those notes. We’re going to work with two kinds of how in this lesson: phrasing, the rhythms you use to play your notes, and root targeting, which means landing on the root note of the chord that is being played at any given moment. The root note of the chord is the note the chord is named after; for example, the root note of a D7 chord is D, the root of a G chord is G, and so on.
First Licks
Instead of beginning at the lowest or highest note of the minor-pentatonic scale on the guitar, let’s start right in the middle, with the A on the seventh fret of the fourth string (Example 1, below). This is the root of the scale, just like the first and last note of the A minor-pentatonic scale fingering shown previously, but in a more central and useful register.
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Example 1
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Starting from here, the flatted third and fourth of the scale are just a string away (Example 2). The rest of the scale—the fifth and flatted seventh—is also just a string away, one string below the root (Example 3).
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Example 2
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Example 3
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