| cm ‘0 PenatoreSeales:Chaper2Rock Guitar Secrets 0 gg ‘There are those who say that there is no such thing as a blues scale. Either you have the blues or you don’t. Ok ... these are "wise words", but not very helpful when you're learning how to improvise. It's certainly true that you can’t learn the feeling for the blues from a book. You have to spend hours listening to and jamming along with Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan or the old blues masters like B.B. King, Albert King and Muddy Waters. But the term "blues scale" has found worldwide acceptance, so Ill use it, too. { THE FLATTED FIFTH - THE BLUE NOTE The blues scale is a very important device for improvising, very similar in construction to the pentatonic scale (the minor pentatonic, to be exact). The only difference lies in the addition of | the blue note, the fiatted fifth, meaning the chromatic note between the fourth and the fifth. This note removes the slickness from the pentatonic scale and gives it more of a rock feeling. The fietted fifth is the most dissonant and tension-flled interval in music. Used effectively, it can give your playing a lot of color. A minor pentatonic THE FIVE POSITIONS OF THE BLUES SCALE Here are the five positions of the blues scale. I've put special emphasis on the blue notes by | marking them with an x. A tp: instead of seeing them as "new", try to see them as your familiar pentatonic scales with an additional note (the flatted fifth). It will make things much easier. Pattern 1a7 The Blues Scale « Chapter 3 Pattern 4Rock Guitar Secrets 60 Along with the more jazzderived practice of dividing the fingerboard into five positions (chapter 5, pg. 44), the usage of three-notes-per-string scales has become quite popular in recent years, especially in hard rock and metal. This concept should already be somewhat familiar to you: in pattem 5 of the conventional major scale patterns (see pg. 45) we've already dealt with this kind of fingering which we also looked at in the previous chapter on alternate picking. This new division is advantageous not only because it makes the fingerboard easier to deal with, especially when moving from the major scale to others, but because it also makes it easier to apply techniques like alternate picking and legato all over the fingerboard. THE SEVEN MODES OF THE MAJOR SCALE Here are the seven new C major scale positions: F - lydian A- aeoliana Major Scale Modes - Chapter 7 B- locrian C -ionian ‘As you can see, I've added the name of the respective modes to the fingering positions.