Robben's Diminished Blues TRICKS

this video is going to show you the various ways in which Robin Ford uses the diminished scale to create tension within a 12 Bar Blues now this can often seem like a very complicated subject and hearing things like octasonic and symmetrical scales for the first time can induce nightmares in the uninitiated we're going to build this into something we all know and love really well namely the pentatonic and blues scales we'll also look at how Robin approaches The Blues from a chordal perspective because if you understand the harmony then ultimately this is going to give you that joyous sense of Freedom where the guitar neck becomes our playground when improvising so if you feel like you're stuck in pentatonic Purgatory stick around because delving into these outside sounds can help open doors for developing your own voice my name is Steve warsworth let's Dive In [Music] [Music] um foreign [Music] I've been a massive Robin Ford fan for as long as I can remember he's got an insanely good ear and an amazing sense of Rhythm and phrasing now although he's primarily a blues player he often Strays onto the Jazzy side of the street which is what I love when I first became aware of the diminished sound in his blues and Beyond book and video release way back in 1992. now this really opened my ears and eyes to the possibilities that lay Beyond The Humble pentatonic now I thought I'd got a really good handle on The Blues from listening to Great such as BB King Albert King Steve Ray Vaughan you name it now I must stress that I absolutely love these players but Robin had this extra level of harmonic sophistication that added to the standard pentatonic vocabulary so we'll be focusing on using the diminished scale in some key areas of the 12 Bar blue sequence and this can create some of those real head turning moments so before we jump headlong into the scales and licks it's a really good idea to develop some understanding I've had diminished seventh chords function within the Blues I'm going to play a Slow Blues in a using some typical Robin forward voicings and I want you to really focus on where we hear the tension and release [Music] so as you can see there are three main points in a 12 Bar blue sequence where we tend to have diminished seventh chords and they're there to add to that sense of anticipation and tension as we're traveling to the next chord in the sequence now the first is when we're moving from the one chord in the key of A that'll be A7 to our D7 that's the four chord and in between there our bridging chord our diminished seventh chord is simply there to add to that sense of tension and then resolve really nicely and we go to the four chord our dominant seventh chords lend themselves really well to outside sounds largely because we've got a major Triad and a diminished Triad on top of one another so there's already quite a bit of tension inside of this chord but we can add more by fully extending this diminished Triad [Music] by going up another minor third to the B flat there of the sixth fret another perhaps more practical way of looking at this is thinking of an A7 arpeggio we've got root third fifth and flat seven instead of playing the root we replace that semitone above with our B flat [Music] and we've created the diminished seventh arpeggio now either way you look at it what we're doing there is superimposing a diminished seventh arpeggio over the top of an A7 chord and what this is doing is outlining the sound of an A7 flat 9 chord you can hear there's a lot of tension inside that chord and it really wants to resolve to our four chord now Robin Prof slight variation on this one which is this shape this is an a13 flat 9 chord you can see it's kind of like a mirror image of that to minus seventh chords but we've just got this triangle shape on the top and then we just put the thumb on that bottom string this takes us to the scale itself which is a half hole diminished scale because it's made up of a series of half steps and whole steps now starting on a we can do this on one string just to visualize the pattern it goes like so half step whole step half step and so on now you're probably familiar with the idea of moving diminished seventh chords around in minor third intervals foreign [Music] and that's because the diminished seventh chord itself is built from a series of minor third intervals [Music] third and [Music] we can start to build some ideas using this concept [Music] this is a great starting lick to help you visualize the landing note the most important lesson here is that we've got an exit strategy so this is all about targeting chord tones in the chord that we're moving to in this case because we're going from an A7 to a D7 we're looking for some of those notes from within the D7 so the root the third the fifth or the flat and seventh in this case as we travel through the lick [Music] up which is the major third of our D7 chord you can see it inside of that chord now only is this Lick in minor thirds [Music] foreign but of course we can also transpose this up and down in minor third intervals so if we take this lick down a minor third into second position [Music] we've got a different Landing note there here we're looking for the D which is the root of our D7 we can do the same thing as well if we go up a minor third [Music] we're targeting the fifth of D7 another way to visualize and get new Concepts under the fingers is to build them into familiar ideas so the next lick is based on a Clapton A7 idea we can see we're in and around the A7 chord there [Music] and we can take that idea and move it up and down in three fret intervals foreign [Music] [Applause] and by doing this we're actually picking up on all of those notes from the diminished scale [Music] thank you [Music] now the reason this works is because inside of this lick we've got our half hole diminished scale [Music] foreign just like the first lick we can transpose this up and down in minor third intervals this adds a huge amount of value to anything that we learn because any lick that's based around that diminished scale can be played in three other positions if you enjoyed this video then don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification Bell to keep up to date with my future content the next part of the 12 Bar sequence where we typically see a diminished chord is when we're traveling back from the four chord to the one so usually somewhere in bar six all we do is take our D7 that's our four chords raise the root note of one semitone and we've got an E flat diminished seventh chord this is known as the gospel lift because it's used in a lot of gospel chord progressions and it resolves really beautifully back to that A7 chord [Music] so this obviously signposts the potential use of diminished seventh arpeggios and the halfhold diminished scale now this can be quite confusing because all of our shapes sit one fret below where we were for our A7 chord [Music] over the A7 chord we were here [Music] now this can be quite difficult to visualize but one thing you can do is relate it to the blue scale so if we take our a minor blues scale [Music] you can see that we've got quite a lot of common notes with our diminished seventh arpeggio we've got our root note we've got a minor third we've got the flattened fifth the only one that's different in there is the major sixth foreign [Music] through from bars three to six of our 12 Bar Blues so this is as we're transitioning from the one to the four chord and then back to the one again [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] so this uses a combination of the a half-hole diminished scale for the A7 [Music] and D half hole diminished for our D7 chord [Music] now this can be quite hard to visualize because as I mentioned before these two scales in arpeggios are only one semitone apart from each other so it's quite easy to get muddled up between the two now one thing that Robin does quite a lot is to use a dominant seventh arpeggio as a springboard to get them into using the diminished so here we start out with the root third fifth flat seven instead of going to the root again we jump to the flat nine [Music] and that'll get us into our diminished seventh arpeggio I'd highly recommend cycling Around chords one to four as this can really help you feel and hear those changes I've left the link down below to a backing track that does just this so the final place where we can potentially play some diminished ideas is in the last part of the 12 part sequence so this is as we turn around from the five chord back to the start again this functions in exactly the same way as before we take our E7 arpeggio we raise the root note one semitone [Music] and we've got our diminished seven substitution and we should be able to see that half hole diminish scale in there too [Music] [Music] now an interesting side note to this is the minor third relationship to the chords that we're using as well so if we take that dominant 13 flat 9 chord that we looked at earlier on [Music] so here we're playing an e13 flat 9 chord we can actually move this chord around in minor third intervals as well now when we get down here we're in Familia Hendricks territory because we're playing an E7 sharp nine chord now this is yet another diminished signpost for Robin now you'll often integrate some of these chord shapes into his soul link just to create a little bit of tension [Music] hopefully this video has given you some nice outside ideas to try out over a blues remember the key here is really understanding the Harmony and nailing that Landing note rather than the licks themselves so make them your own play around with the timing and the phrasing and definitely transpose them into different keys I'll see you next time

Channel: Steve Allsworth

Views: 248,102

Keywords: robben ford, robben ford guitar lesson, robben ford guitar, blues guitar lesson, blues guitar, blues soloing, blues solo guitar, robben ford blues, blues, diminished scale, diminished blues licks, guitar, steve allsworth guitar, steve allsworth, 12 bar blues guitar lesson, outside soloing, outside soloing guitar, improvising blues guitar, blues guitar licks, music theory guitar, music theory, robben ford solo

Id: W61duTFdWO0

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023