Advance Your Blues Playing Like Robben Ford And Larry Carlton!

one of the keys to advancing from an intermediate to Advanced player is the ability to outline chord changes while improvising solos and not just play notes that work over the changes but to play lines that weave through the changes and connect the underlying Harmony this is an essential element to the sophisticated lines you hear from players like Robin Ford Larry Carlton and certainly jazz players like Wes Montgomery in today's lesson I'm going to take you through a few of the techniques I use to accomplish this my name is Jack roosh welcome to my channel let's get into it thank you so in today's lesson we're in the key of a major and we're playing a simple three chord 12 Bar Blues now the backing track for this lesson is going to be available to download over on my patreon page now when you're soloing over a tune like this there's a lot of approaches you can use and when I was starting out I would have used a simple kind of pentatonic Blues lick approach relying heavily on repeating licks and phrases something like this [Music] thank you [Music] now this is a great approach and playing this way will really help you focus on the sound you're getting out of your hands your touch your vibrato your bending your pick attack all these things that are really essential to getting a good sound out of the instrument but playing licks and simple scale patterns is going to run into some limitations and I got to a point where I wanted to play more melodically and play things that really outlined the chord changes so I started working on things like Triads and arpeggios which helped me to Target chord tones and this is going to get you to a place where you're really playing over the changes and playing notes that's specifically outline the different chords in the progression something like this [Music] [Music] thank you so it should be no surprise that I'm a huge fan of Robin Ford and Larry Carlton as well as jazz players like Grant Green Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery and listening to these guys really got me interested in different harmonic devices that allow you to transition between the cords in a blues this is what I would call playing through the changes instead of just playing over the changes so I'm going to play a solo demonstration now that uses some of these different devices I'll play it down and then we'll break down some of the things that I'm doing here [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] before we get started if you would like the tabs and notation for this solo it's available over on my patreon page along with tabs and notation for all of my lessons here on YouTube and hundreds of backing tracks it's only five dollars a month but it's a really great way to support this channel alright so the first thing I want to talk about in this solo is using the altered scale to get to the IV chord the altered scale over dominant chords are functioning dominant chords is kind of a staple in jazz and jazz blues playing and really the easiest way to get into this is just learn the scale in one octave in one position so we're playing this over A7 so I'm going to play the a altered scale that's starting on a and ending on a and it's just the root a half step up to the flat nine a whole step from there to the sharp nine and then a half step up to the major third a whole step up to the flat five whole step up to the sharp five whole step up to the flat seven and then we're back at the root so just learning that is a really great way to start getting this kind of slightly exotic scale under your fingers when I was first learning this that was exactly how I kind of went about it I got comfortable with the feel and the sound of it there and then started moving it around the fretboard so the line that I play in this solo to get to the four chord is straight up out of that position right there I just go I'm really just going down the scale except I skipped the flat five right there I jump right down to the third and then sharp nine flat nine root flat seven and then land on the third of the four chord so targeting the chord tone so just a simple line like that really right out of the scale [Music] but it really bends your ear it builds some tension over that functioning dominant chord that then resolves to the D chord so this next thing we're going to talk about happens over the IV chord going back to the one chord now in a blues it's super common to play the IV chord and then go up a half step and play a diminished seventh chord that leads you back to the one chord and you can take that diminished thing a step further and play a full diminished scale a whole half diminished scale [Music] and in this example I really just play right out of that scale [Music] lead it back to a chord tone of the A7 chord there's a great example of this in the West Montgomery Song D Natural Blues he plays a lick very similar to that in his solo so using this diminished scale over that second half of the IV chord to lead you back to the one chord is just another way to kind of build tension and take you outside of the normal Harmony you would hear in a blues and allows you to weave together those two chords in a very interesting way so the next thing I want to talk about is a relatively simple idea but really effective with this type of playing and that's the idea of connecting chord tones together with chromatic notes now if you know your arpeggio shapes you know the chord tones to these chords but sometimes just playing out of the arpeggio can sound a bit like an exercise so the real key to making it musical is connecting the dots together with chromatic notes now I use this over the five chord the east seven going down to the D7 just by connecting different arpeggio shapes together with chromatic notes all right just kind of outlining this E7 shape but connecting those notes together with chromatic notes and then opportunity to lead up chromatically to the third of the D7 and again just using this D7 arpeggio shape so [Music] and then using that to lead into some classic Blues phrasing so this is the type of thing you can do all over the place in these types of situations right [Music] and I do it a bunch in this solo so it's something to definitely check out and something you can explore as you're learning your arpeggio shapes alright so the last thing I want to talk about is another device we can use to go from the one chord to the four chord and it's similar to two of the things we already talked about it's the half hole diminished scale so it's sort of the sister scale to the other diminished scale that we played and it's also very similar and has a similar application to the altered scale we played the altered scale in this one position in the one octave if we play the diminished scale in that same spot it's very similar it just has a few different notes [Music] sixth in it and the cool thing about this is It's a symmetrical scale so you can move it up in minor thirds just like diminished Triads or diminished seventh chords so I can start it on a I could start it on C I could start it on E flat foreign and so the lick that I played is out of that position [Music] and I used that to lead to the IV chord Again by targeting a chord tone of that D7 I went down to the flat seven so that lick again played slow [Music] it's sort of a sequence lick that Cycles through the notes of that scale and again if you want the tabs in notation for this solo check it out on my patreon page but this is just another harmonic device we can use to transition between these chords and this is something you hear a ton in Robin Ford's playing it's sort of his go-to for getting outside on these transitions between these chords so hopefully this lesson gives you some new things to consider when you're playing the blues I know there's a lot to unpack in this lesson so definitely head over to the patreon page to check out the notation so you can work through the solo at your own pace I'll also have the backing track up there for you to practice along to so until next time happy practicing and take care

Channel: Jack Ruch

Views: 92,999

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Id: 4pleQrlOJpw

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023