Expanding The Blues Masterclass

INTRODUCTION

Expanding The Blues is, primarily, for blues players who feel themselves locked into the pentatonic box shape and wish to incorporate some of those ‘tasty’ notes used by players like Robben Ford, Larry Carlton and Matt Schofield. The essence of what those great musicians do is to target certain chord tones that can be found in an embellished, jazz-inspired version of the 12-bar blues chord sequence. There are many such versions of the 12-bar sequence, and you’ll find a typical example on the backing track. It goes as follows:

|G9 |C9 C#dim7 |G9 |Dm7 G9 |

|C |C9 C#dim7 |Gmaj7 Am7 |Bm7 E7#9 |

|Am7 |D9 Ab13 |G13 E7#9 |Am7 D9 |

It should be noted that your tried and tested pentatonic blues licks will still work on this and will, in fact, often take on a new flavour as the underlying chords will create moments of tension and release. That said, we can go a step further, increasing and intensifying these new flavours by means of some choice and tasteful use of chromatic passing tones, chord tone targeting and other devices you’ll find in this masterclass.

The big challenge for me in creating this masterclass was to try to make the licks sound as natural as possible. With that in mind, all the examples were improvised on the spot. They are fairly representative of the way I would approach this blues progression in an actual gig situation. Having said that, I’ve leaned more towards simplicity because I want students to really understand what’s happening, sonically and mathematically, when we use these ‘extra’ notes outside of the regular blues scale. If you enjoy working with this masterclass as much as I enjoyed working on it with my friends at JTC, maybe we can develop the theme further with a Vol 2 and 3 in the future.