Get out of open position and play fingerstyle blues in E all the way up the neck! In this two-hour workshop you'll learn how to:

  • Build a vocabulary of memorable chord-based, double stop and call-and-response licks
  • Mix and match your new vocabulary to create an endless flow of variations
  • Incorporate each new lick into your existing open position playing
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How Do You Find Licks Up The Neck?

It might seem like the best place to start is with scales, but that's not necessarily so. First, learning even one scale in enough positions to cover the entire neck gives you an overwhelming number of notes to remember and use, without helping you prioritize which ones will sound best over a given chord. And second, the higher you get on the neck, the more space between your licks and the steady bass notes below them. The further you get out of open position, the skinnier and starker those single-note licks are going to sound if they're waving around up there all by themselves.

MAP THE FINGERBOARD WITH CHORD SHAPES

However, if we start with chords, we solve both of these problems from the outset. Mapping out 7th chords on the top three strings gives us just four shapes to remember, immediately shows us where the important notes are (the chord tones), and gives us a simple and effective way to support the melodies we're playing. Any time our melody lands on a chord tone, we can add in additional notes from the same chord, easily found on the next couple of strings down.          

CREATE HARMONIZED SCALES WITH DOUBLE STOPS

Moving around chord voicings all the time can get a little clunky, so that's where double stops come in. Not quite chords, not quite single notes, double stops are two notes played at the same time on parallel strings – the intro to "Soul Man" is a classic example. The way we're going to use them, double stops are basically harmonized scales, so they give you a way to play melodies, yet support them with harmony notes underneath. Add a third note and you're back to chords, drop out the harmony and you've got single notes. In just a couple of steps, you can always have some double stops up your sleeve as way to fill out a melody or thin out your chord moves.

CALL AND RESPONSE: MIX SINGLE-NOTE LICKS WITH CHORD HITS

When you do want to play single note licks, you can punctuate them with chord hits. This is a classic strategy in blues and jazz known as "call and response." You play a cool lick, you answer it with an equally cool chord move. 7ths, 9ths, 6ths, 13ths – the contrast between single notes and chord hits is always effective, and you can trim those voicings down to just the essentials, too. Tritones, or two-string double-stops including just the 3rd and b7th of a dominant 7th chord, are one of the improvisor's best friends.

A Simple Path Toward Improvisation

Learning what to play is an important step, but it's only half of the equation. The rest involves learning how to play what you've learned. And as the blues is a largely improvisational art form, it's easy to get hung up on this simple conundrum: how do I make the leap from learning and memorizing specific moves to actually improvising and creating my own music?

BUILD A VOCABULARY OF VARIATIONS

For starters, let's relax a little about becoming genius improvisors, magically creating something brand new out of whole cloth every time we sit down to play. Much of what comes across as improvisation is more like a string of variations, the work of a musician who's assimilated a bagful of licks deeply enough to mix and match them in real time. In a style like solo fingerstyle blues, you've got to maintain coordination between your thumb and fingers at all times. So rather than thinking abstractly about scales over a bass, it can help to think in terms of building a working vocabulary of specific moves, which you can then learn to assemble on the fly.

TO SOUND INEVITABLE, KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING

The progression is always moving, and whatever chord you're on is always about to resolve to the next chord. Put another way, at any point in the blues progression, whatever you're playing is happening in the context of the chord you're on – and the chord you're going to. Categorize each lick you learn in terms of where it belongs in the progression, and you'll have the beginnings of a vocabulary where everything you play sounds not just correct, but inevitable.

SWAP IN LICKS BASED ON THE CHORD PROGRESSION

Ultimately, you want to have licks that sound good for each moment when the progression changes: when you're going from I up to IV, when you're returning from IV to I, when you're playing through the turnaround, and so on. You only need a few licks in each category before you can start swapping them in for one another, and once you do, the number of possible combinations gets pretty big, pretty fast. When you have a vocabulary of licks that resolve from one chord to the next, and the understanding and reflexes to vary them based on where you are in the progression, you'll be improvising.

Expand Your Fingerstyle Blues

Playing up the neck is a great way to expand your vocabulary in the steady bass style. At the conclusion of this workshop, you'll have a dozen new four-measure fingerstyle blues phrases to work on, an understanding of how to apply them to the blues in E, and a roadmap for improvising your own solos and variations on the twelve-bar blues. I'll go through every example on camera, pointing out essential left- and right-hand techniques, explaining why each chord and phrase works the way it does, and suggesting plenty of additional ways to vary and develop the material from the class.

Why a live workshop? How does it work?

I've been doing in depth live streams for the past eighteen months as part of my monthly membership, The Fingerstyle Five, and on my Youtube channel. Since  my first weekend Workshop in Noevember, I've had numerous requests for a class on how to play blues up the neck. 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.

Join The Interactive Live Stream This Saturday

Blues Up The Neck! is a two-hour live-online workshop being streamed this Saturday, March 6th 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
Click Here To Register

Ready to get playing?

Fingerstyle Blues Vocabulary In E is available now for $37 and includes:

  • Twelve in-depth lessons totaling over two hours of video instruction
  • Line-by-line walkthroughs of every solo
  • Clear, accurate downloadable PDFs with notation and tab for all six solos
  • Downloadable videos for every lesson
  • Unlimited streaming of every lesson
Click here to get started!

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