Blues Scale Lesson

[Aleck Cobbs]

The blues scale is a six-note progression that sounds right at home in blues, rock, and country music. This scale is essentially the pentatonic scale plus one chromatic note, often called the blue note. This extra step gives the blues scale that unmistakably bluesy sound.

Once you've tried the blues scale, download Fender Play to learn essential blues riffs, techniques, and classic songs by legends like RobertJohnson, Stevie Ray Vaughan and more with the Blues Form Basics: I IV V Guitar Collection in Fender Play!

Mastering the blues scale will give you the tools you need to improvise over a range of chord progressions, from a classic 12-bar blues to a driving rock and roll song. In addition to boosting your improvisational skills, practicing this scale will also help you train your ear so you can learn new bluesy licks to incorporate into your playing.

The intervals that make up the minor blues scale are the same in any key. These intervals are: A whole step and a half step, a whole step, a half step, a half step, a whole step and a half step, and a whole step.

To play the A minor blues scale in 1st position, use your index finger for notes on the 1st fret, your middle finger for notes on the 2nd, your ring finger for notes on the third, and your pinky for notes on the 4th fret.

To play the A minor blues scale in 5th position, use your index finger for notes on the 5th fret, your middle finger for the 6th, your ring finger for the 7th, and your pinkie for notes on the 8th fret. This scale starts on the 5th fret of the low E string. This version is also known as an E-shaped blues scale.

The A minor blues scale in the 7th position starts with your index finger on the 7th fret of the D string. You will need to shift your hand position up one fret when you reach the B string so you can play notes on the 8th fret with your index finger. This scale is also known as the D-shaped blues scale.

To play the A minor blues scale in 12th position, start with your index finger on the 12th fret of the A string. This scale does require you to shift your hand position up one fret once you reach the B string so that your index finger is on the 13th fret. Then, you must shift your hand back to your starting position for the high E string. This scale is also known as the A-shaped blues scale.

In this Technique of the Week, Kirk Fletcher (Fabulous Thunder Birds and Mannish Boys) teaches the pentatonic blues guitar scale which is essential for beginner blues guitarists. Fletcher breaks down this versatile scale and plays his favorite phrases rooted in pentatonic blues.

Each of these scale shapes are moveable. This means that you can play these patterns anywhere on the neck of your guitar. Learning and memorizing the notes on the E, A, and D strings of your guitar will come in handy as you practice moving each of these scales up and down the fretboard of your guitar.

Play the 12-bar blues using downstrokes and emphasize the first and third beat of every measure to get the right rhythm. You might also find this 12-bar blues described as a blues shuffle thanks to this shuffling rhythm. Here is a guitar tab showing a standard 12-bar blues pattern.

Blues Scale ExercisesPracticing the blues scale in A minor is a great way to train your fingers and your ears while you learn this versatile scale. First, practice playing the scales on your own until you are comfortable playing the A minor blues scale in each position.

Then, with a looping accompaniment of the 12-bar blues in A, practice playing the A minor blues scale in each position, but with a syncopated rhythm. Listen to the accompaniment and play the scale in sections, treating the notes on each string as one phrase. Once this feels easy to you, experiment by breaking up the scale into three- or four-note sections across strings.

Another great way to practice the blues scales on guitar is to spend time playing each shape up and down the neck of your guitar. Starting with the E-shaped blues scale, play each scale ascending and descending, beginning at the first fret and moving up one fret for each repetition of the shape. Play the scale in this way up to the thirteenth fret, then begin moving down one fret for each cycle until you arrive back at the first fret.

Playing the scales over a 12-fret span on your guitar will allow you to hear the scale in every key, helping you to train your ear. You can also use this exercise to help you memorize the notes on the E, A, and D strings by saying the root note of each scale as you go up and down the neck.

Just like the other 4 scale shapes we looked at, you can move this entire shape to other keys. Just move the shape so that the root notes line up with the root note of the key you want to play in. If you wanted to play a C minor blues scale, you would move the entire shape up 3 frets.

As your technique improves, and as you begin to learn blues songs and licks, this scale is going to give you a context for seeing songs and licks that will help you learn and remember music more quickly and easily. This is the power of scales!

Ok now we are going to add 2 more notes that will give us all the important notes in the blues scale that we can play without bending. The new notes we are adding are the blow and draw 1 which will take us all the way to the bottom of the range of the harmonica for the lowest notes we can play in this blues scale.

First of all, what is a scale in general? It can be hard to really lock down a definition for this, but I consider a scale to be a collection of notes that share a certain relationship with each other and with a set of chords that they are being played over.

So, overall the blues scale is a 6 note scale that takes the 5 notes from the minor pentatonic scale and adds the blues note to it. The first of those 6 notes is called the root note, which will be included in the name of the scale.

On the guitar, those 6 notes will occur repeatedly, spreading out over the entire fretboard. Here is a picture of the notes in the A blues scale spread out over the first 12 frets on the neck of the guitar:

To someone first learning this scale, all these notes can seem pretty overwhelming. Luckily, some parts of the scale are more commonly used than others. Learning the full pattern of the scale up and down the neck is a good thing to eventually do, but you can get a lot out of learning just a few parts of the scale at first.

This is by far the most commonly used part of this scale. Often, if a guitarist only knows one scale pattern, this is it. Many of the most common blues and rock guitar licks come from this scale pattern. So, it makes sense to start here with learning the scale.

If you are playing in the box pattern and you want to extend into a lower register, you can add some bass notes from the scale a little lower on the neck. When combining this with the Albert King box, you are left with an extended box pattern:

So, I would recommend learning the box pattern first, followed by these extensions. You can really do a lot with these patterns and some of the early blues guitarists only knew these portions of the blues scale.

This process is somewhat similar to figuring out the blues progression in another key, which I described in the first article in this series. You first have to be able to find your root note on the 6th string. Here is a diagram of the notes on the 6th and 5th strings, for reference:

We have 3 root notes: one on the 6th string, one on the 4th string, and one on the 1st string. To make things easier, we can just focus on the root note on the 6th string. To play this scale in another key, you simply have to move the pattern so its root note is positioned on the note you want. For instance, to play the G blues scale, you would move the pattern to the 3rd fret so that the root note is on a G. As long as your root on the 6th string is where you want it, the other root notes will fall into place too. No matter where you move the scale, you can add the extensions to it. Here is the G blues scale with the extensions added:

The minor blues scale is one of the most versatile scales that you can use in your guitar solos. It is fairly easy to finger on the guitar, fun to solo with and a great way to begin playing in a jazz guitar setting.

In this section you will learn how to build, play, practice, and solo with the minor blues scale in a jazz setting, as well as check out a sample solo to help you bring this scale from the page and onto the fretboard in your practice routine.

You can also think of the minor blues scale as a minor pentatonic scale with an added b5 note. This added note is often referred to as the blue note. This blue note characterizes the minor blues scale and sounds very bluesy when applied to your jazz guitar soloing lines.

To produce a major blues scale, you simply take the major pentatonic scale and add in a blue note, the b3 of the key. This added note gives the major blues scale its bluesy vibe and separates it melodically from the major pentatonic scale.

The notes of the C major blues scale (C D Eb E G A) are the same as the notes from the A minor blues scale (A C D Eb E G), but they start on a different note and are used in another way.

To help you get started with the major blues scale, and learn how to apply it to soloing situations, here are a few sample licks that you can learn, work in 12 keys, and use as the basis for your own lines.

To really get this lick into the swing style, try and accent the first and last notes (play them louder) of the lick. This will bring an emphasis to the outer notes of the lick, and add an extra layer of rhythmic interest to the line itself.

Because the pattern is 3 notes long but played in an 8th-note rhythm, you are syncopating the lick so that it starts on a different part of the bar each time. This allows you to build energy in your solo, as well as use a repeated lick without it sounding boring.

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