Returning to key of A section:
Our next key moves to A, and for this the purists among you will recoil in horror as I pick one of my old Valley Arts guitars which have EMG pick ups and the infamous Floyd Rose tremolo, both of which are like sunlight to a vampire for your average Blues purist. But hey, it happens to be a killer guitar and Blues comes totally from the player, NOT the guitar! There is some thinking behind the decision to use my VA in that the guitar sort of represents the more muso approach to a 12 bar, with note choice highlighting the chords you are playing over, some chromatic phrases, pentatonic substitution, the introduction of the mixolydian mode and generally taking a more Fusion approach.
For this approach you are considering the strong note choices for each chord, so you need to know where your roots, minor and major 3rds, dominant 7ths, 9ths, 5th and b5ths all are and how they sit within your phrasing and improvisations. Investigate how great the mixolydian mode works within Blues. Try not to limit yourself to box shapes and get some passing notes happening. The obvious guys to listen to are the true greats of guitar, such as Robben Ford, Larry Carlton, Steve Lukather, Mike Landau. These guys can cross over in genres and be masters within each. But listen to them play Blues, and you will find out how beautiful the guitar is as an instrument and how expressive and musical you can be within a Blues context. I openly lay my cards on the table and say I draw a lot from these guys and have tried to creep a little of what they might do into our key of A improv.
D key change section:
As we move to the key of D I break out my 335 and a glass slide. The undisputed masters of Blues slide would be players like Sonny Landreth and Derek Trucks, who generally likes to use open tuning. It's another proposition to keep your guitar in regular tuning and play some lines using the slide. Everybody has a view and opinion on how you are supposed to do it but I say you have to just dive in and do what works for you. My big influence, pre-Internet as a kid, was Jeff Beck. I think I saw him playing slide on TV once and I figured that is how you are supposed to do it, so it just stuck. Your main criteria are pitching, vibrato and muting. There are plenty of tutorials out there to research (including my own Pro Concepts column for GI!), with many different opinions, but try to hold on to the fact that there is no right way or wrong way, there is just your way.
Key of E section:
So as we come back to E for our last 12 bars and I wanted to involve the whammy bar. I broke out one of the best Strats I own, which is a custom shop prototype of the Jeff Beck Strat. This guitar was one of the first 12 ever made, and was on display at the 1991 NAMM show. Again, purists might recoil at my use of the whammy bar, but they obviously don't appreciate the Blues mastery of Scott Henderson and Jeff Beck, and how they might approach a Blues improv. You guys all know how I generally incorporate trem use in my playing, and it has been something I've worked on for a very, very long time, in fact ever since I bought the '63 Strat played at the top of this tutorial, when I was 14. It came with a trem system, so I just started using it. So again there is no right way or wrong way, it just has to sound bluesy. Maybe try to think of the whammy bar as a way to impersonate using a bottleneck, but again your pitching and vib with the bar are the elements that need the most work.
I hope you enjoy playing and experimenting over my backing track. Remember that good Blues playing is the best foundation for more advanced playing. It teaches you touch, feel, dynamics, vibrato, string bending, expression, phrasing, and that's just for starters.
Many players out there think that Blues guitar is a simple genre to play, when in fact it is one of the hardest. I've only scratched the surface with stylistic approaches that can be taken within Blues because it's a massive subject with a huge diverse melting pot of exponents, from BB to SRV, Peter Green to Joe Bonamassa, Eric to Jimi, all have their own take on it and something to teach us. I'm still learning to do it at any decent level myself.major, C/E, D minor, Dm/C to B7. We outline the B7 chord with an arpeggio that isn't used that often by Gilmour, the B dominant 7th arpeggio, but I've performed it in a Gilmour-esque way to show how you can add flavours of his playing to other techniques and approaches. We conclude with bends that outline the chords of E7#9 to E7b9 before concluding the solo over the final.
