Add sophisticated new blues licks to your steady bass vocabulary! By the end of this two-hour workshop you'll have:
- A collection of four-bar licks you can immediately plug into any twelve bar blues in E
- A clear understanding of where to use them and how they spell out the chord changes
- Easy-to-follow rules for mixing and matching those licks to create hundreds of variations on the blues
New Vocabulary For Steady Bass Blues
If you're a fingerstyle guitarists with a basic understanding of how to play steady bass blues, Blues Changes will expand your vocabulary with jazz-inspired blues licks for the entire twelve-bar progression, and give you a reliable, repeatable way to get any new material under your fingers and into your playing as quickly as possible.
JAZZ SOUNDS FOR BLUES GUITAR
When I say "jazz," I'm not talking about anything super complicated, overly fast or remotely resembling elevator music. I'm talking about the funky, soulful blues-based jazz of the 1950s and 1960s called hard bop or soul jazz. When you hear musicians like Grant Green, Kenny Burrell, Ray Bryant or Stanley Turrentine, you're hearing a near-perfect mix of sophisticated, flowing eighth-note lines and straight-up blues scale riffs and licks. If you play any steady bass blues already, you've probably got a pretty good handle on the blues licks part. Now imagine adding in some of that eighth note flow and a few chromatic notes, and using that to tag the roots and thirds of the chords as they go by.
THE LOGIC OF LICKS
You probably learned blues by learning licks. I know I did. "Hey, check out this Dave Van Ronk move!" "Look, here's a thing you can do on the IV chord..." But when you want to expand your vocabulary with some jazzier ideas, suddenly it's time to memorize a bunch of unfamiliar scales, in a bunch of unfamiliar positions. Then you go and try to improvise with all that, and it doesn't sound like music, it sounds....like scales. But there's no reason you can't add some cool jazz sounds to your playing the same way you learned blues – by learning a handful of cool licks and how to fit them into the blues form. In this workshop, we'll go one step further. As you learn each lick, we'll break down how it works so you're not just memorizing fingerings, you're learning how licks and chords fit together, too.
"PLAYING THE CHANGES" AND WHY IT MATTERS
Most of us learn to play blues by taking one scale – the minor pentatonic scale or the blues scale – and applying it to the entire progression. Swing and jazz musicians do that too, but combine it with a focus on making sure the licks they play help to spell out the sound of the chord they're on, the chord they're heading to next, or both. Then they create tension and excitement by continually contrasting these two approaches. Playing the changes isn't really any harder than playing pentatonic scales, but in order to do it on the blues, you need to know how swing and jazz musicians think about the blues progression, and the additional chords they like to include. As part of this workshop, we'll look at how the blues progression evolved from the basic I IV V into the jazz version of the chord changes, and you'll learn how to use those chords as the basis for new blues licks.
A Method For Improvising
Getting new licks under your fingers is only half the game. The rest is learning how to pull them out when you need them and put them where you want. I think of this second part as "practicing improvisation," and while it sounds like an oxymoron, it can be a simple, step-by-step process. Much of what seems like improvisation is more a matter of assembling existing licks than pure invention, and if you can learn the licks themselves, you can learn to mix and match them as well.
WORKING LINE BY LINE
The first step is to break the blues into three four-bar lines. Thinking about four bars at a time is easier than staring twelve whole bars in the face all at once, plus it makes sense musically to group your ideas into four-bar sections. In this workshop, I'll show you three different examples of how to play through bars 1-4, through bars 5-8 and through bars 9-12. That way, you can see not only specific ways to play over any one chord, but also hear what it sounds like to go from chord to chord and turn individual licks into whole phrases.
MIX AND MATCH PHRASES
Once you know a few different ways to play each four-bar line, you can start stringing them together to create whole choruses of the blues. This makes for more music than you might think: you've got three choices for the first line, three choices for the second line, and three choices for the third line. That makes for a total of twenty-seven different ways to construct a chorus of blues, and that's not counting mixing in any blues licks and phrases you already know.
ENDLESS VARIATIONS
Not only that: each four-bar example is really made up of a two-bar opening phrase and a two-bar response. You can mix and match those opening and answering licks too, which means there are really nine different ways to play through each four-bar line. And that means there are really over 700 ways to combine the material in this workshop. While I won't be going over every one of those combinations, I will definitely explain how to work on this material in order to be able to take apart and reassemble all of these licks on the fly.
Expand Your Fingerstyle Blues
Vocabulary and improvisation are at the heart of playing fingerstyle blues. At the conclusion of this workshop, you'll have a deeper understanding of the twelve bar blues progression, a whole collection of new blues licks to work on, and a roadmap for how to combine everything you've learned into compelling, musical solos in the steady bass style. I'll go through every example on camera, pointing out essential left- and right-hand techniques, explaining why each idea and phrase works the way it does, and suggest plenty of additional ways to vary and develop the material from the class.
Register NowWhy a live workshop? How does it work?
The live stream format combines a concentrated amount of material on a specific topic with an interactive, Q&A environment that lets you get your specific questions answered while the workshop is still going on. Before this workshop starts, you'll have a PDF with notation and tab of each example I'm going to teach, so you can focus on watching and learning, knowing the note-for-note specifics are already in your hands. The whole two hours will be archived for later replay, so you'll be able to watch anything you want again for the next three months. And I'll pause at regular intervals to take questions via chat, to clear up aspects of the material that are still unclear.
Yes, you can sign up just to watch the replay later
If you can't be there Saturday morning but still want to learn from this workshop, just register as if you'd be attending live, and catch the replay later, whenever it's most convenient for you.
Sign Up Now
Blues Changes is a two-hour live-online workshop being streamed this Saturday, May 22nd at 10:30AM CST. Registration is $47 and the workshop will include:
- Two hours of live-streamed online instruction
- Downloadable notation and tab of all twelve exercises
- Live chat – ask David your questions as we work through the material
- Access to re-watch the archived live stream for the next three months
