Incredible acoustic blues CHORD and SOLO

how do we make a simple 12 Bar Blues sound really interesting [Music] using different chords different ways to play the chords solos walks and maybe turn around [Applause] if you've been playing the 12 Bar Blues for a while maybe you're getting a little bored of the same old riffs throughout the whole thing there is a technique that we can learn that will allow you to quickly replace any particular thing at any moment so for example to change instead of doing a riff you play a chord or instead of playing a chord you play a little piece of solo now it sounds very difficult to do but the secret is just choose certain measures to do certain things and as you go through and practice it you can make it more complicated as you go so for example let's take just bars three and four and do something more interesting than just playing the Riff so I've got two bars of my e-riff [Music] maybe I can fancy that off a bit I'm gonna slam beat one of bar three and I'm just going to play something simple in e minor pentatonic I could play anything here in open but I have to be sure that I get to the a chord which is bar five we want to make sure that we always hear the harmonic change the chord change especially when we don't have a band backing us up for that little soloing section I often slide up into what I call the extension shape this is this little piece up here which is easy to play It's the five notes of the pentatonic scale and it works so great to slide up into it if you want it also has a blue note at the top and if you really have the brain power left you can aim for this e as your ending note [Applause] so if I go from the top e-riff [Music] I'm going to slam e [Music] foreign now you'll notice that I hit that a that was beat one of bar five because that is the a chord we want to hear that so e here we go slam e hey I gotta hear that a you have to make sure that when you're soloing that you're still kind of listening to the sound of the 12 Bar in your head behind you because you need to make sure that you're only soloing for those two bars and because it's only two bars in a way it's actually kind of freeing it means that we don't have to apply anything too complicated we don't have to play the coolest licks just the fact that you're combining the 12 Bar form with the occasional little bit of solo is already cool enough [Music] hey there it is right now if your licks aren't so fancy as that don't worry about it play anything it can be so simple [Music] that was four notes played in a different combination I don't know let's take that super simple thing and we'll put it in bars three and four [Music] the point is especially right now if you're just learning to combine the 12 bar with licks and other things is keep it simple because the main thing you're learning right now is hearing the 12 Bar in your mind so that you're not going over you're not soloing or doing some other trick over the next chord change we want to hear those chord changes but I should say that you can download the tabs of this exercise from my website which is bluemorris.com and the link is below let's make the first uh four bars a little more complicated by doing what we call a quick change a quick change simply means that you're going to go to the a chord in measure two so it comes pretty quick that's why it's called a quick change um so in this case we get one measure of e one measure of a and then we would have two measures of e but we're going to solo for those two measures of V right so here's e here's the quick change a now I've got a slam e a and that's the next part right so the Quick Change helps the 12 bars sound more interesting because otherwise we do get four measures of e at the beginning of the 12 Bar and it's a long ways um some of the older Blue songs they have those four bars and all that Chuck Berry stuff has four bars of e but a lot of songs have the quick change to make that part a little more interesting so we now have one measure of e we have Quick Change to a we've got two measures of a tiny little solo and then we're in bar five and We Know bar five is a so we're just gonna do an a riff for now you already know how to do that because we did it on the E right and then we know we have two bars of e so we're going to use those bars bars seven and eight which are e to do a little solo again we have e quick change to a d [Music] we have two measures of a just do this for now slam e and that's my little uh Solo in there for bars seven and eight it's getting pretty complicated already but if you can handle it let's just keep adding more interesting things instead of doing this for a the classic uh Blues Boogie riff we're gonna play an A7 chord instead it's not hard it's actually pretty easy to do and the advantage of that is that um just the fact that we're going to record and we're no longer doing the Boogie riff that we were doing is very interesting right sounds so simple but in fact doing Boogie riff and then chord is a very different sound right the chord is going to jangle the chord's going to ring out has a different Groove it's gonna be good let's hear it from the top here's e e riff then we do a riff Quick Change slam e [Music] now A7 [Music] slam e solo right so now we've got riffs we've got solos and we've got chords and we haven't even gone through the whole 12 Bar yet we're still only eight measures in so let's do the last four measures the last four measures are gonna go B7 A7 and then a turnaround so let's just do B7 chord and let's just do an A7 chord because we already did that and I think those always sound good because in that spot we really only have one measure for B7 and one measure for A7 anyway so we don't need anything fancy there let's do up to there slam A7 I got two measures right slam e again [Music] B7 A7 now we have a turnaround a turnaround helps the 12 Bar to sound like it's gonna spin back around and restart right it's going to set up the five chord and the five chord always announces the one chord one chords at the beginning of the song so we're just going to use a classic turnaround we could do tons of them um we can do let's do this one let's see we're gonna go I really like this one especially for acoustic blues so we're going to take this D note here this D note is a fifth fret of the a string and then what I'm going to do I pluck that with my pick and then I hit the high E string with a finger there that's a little bit trickier but you can do it that second fret we notice is the B note and because we want the V chord so we have ah and remember that we always have to slam the one chord before we do the turnaround riff so we slam e we can just do that little e or we could slam a big chord whatever I'm probably just gonna do the little e it's easier can I get to hit B7 my V chord okay here we go whole thing e quick change to a e solo A7 [Music] slam e B7 A7 slam e into to turn around and be and B7 now let's make the B7 a little more interesting just by walking to the B7 this is a very common move the walk goes like this on the a string we go a a sharp B when I'm coming off of bar 8 doing my little solo I'm gonna go now I have to time that because the first two notes are before the B7 right it's a walk to B7 so these come in bar uh in bar eight yeah so if I do my little solo before that [Music] and let's walk to B7 again at the end of the turnaround [Music] yeah more cool right okay so my goodness how do we keep this all in our mind I mean ultimately each of these tricks can be added and removed at any moment you can always just go back to your standard riff ain't nothing wrong with it the Riff sounds great and for now just keep it to a level that is doable for you if it's just adding one of those tricks if it's just adding a little Solo in bars three and four just do that for now right but what we have is we have a pretty complex and cool sounding thing remember the soloing Parts they don't need to be fancy I'm barely doing much honestly it's just minor pentatonic because it sounds cool already the fact that it's just been placed in there in the middle of the song Let's Do It e a [Music] e [Music] I missed my B7 walk there doesn't matter I got there the most important thing is that when you change a section of the 12 Bar you've got to keep it the same length and it's harder than you might think if you haven't done it before so one of the things you can do is try to do it along to a Jam track a slow jam track so that you can hear when the Jam track goes to the a chord make sure you are also going to the a chord and keep the licks that you play when you do the little soloing bit just keep them really simple it really doesn't have to be fancy at all it already sounds good just by fact of us placing it in the 12 bar with everything else going on I'm going to put a video on the screen here for you from my Channel please check that out I've got lots more videos on soloing and blues guitar and acoustic guitar and electric guitar my name is blue Morris and I teach guitar lessons here in Vancouver Canada I'm going to make a video every Saturday for about a year here I hope to see you then

Channel: GuitarLessonsVancouver

Views: 53,429

Keywords: acoustic blues, blues, guitar, lesson, guitar lesson, acoustic guitar lesson, acoustic guitar, blues guitar, acoustic blues guitar lesson, how to play acoustic blues, marty schwartz acoustic blues, Blue Morris, Vancouver

Id: W2NhACz5O6o

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2023