The Blues Scale and Beyond

For the past 5 weeks we've been looking at the pentatonic scale and how to play horizontally all of the fretboard of the guitar in any key. By now you have a wide range of tools to help you with this, so we're going to spend one final lesson on this topic.

We're going to look at some options for adding notes to the scale that you can include in your solos. These notes are like adding some spice or colour — you can think of your pentatonic scale as the bread and butter, and these extra notes are your seasoning.

The Blues Scale

After exploring a few different keys in the last lesson, let's come back to our A minor pentatonic scale and look at changing it into a blues scale. All you have to do is add a D♯ between the D and E. One octave of this scale in the 5th fret position looks like this:

Now we have a 6-note scale. All we did was add one note. To complete the whole position, we just need to find where all the D♯'s (also called E♭) are. There's only one more in this position — it's on the 8th fret of the 3rd string:

Once you've played the scale up and down as shown in Fig. 1b, improvise with this new scale and emphasise the D♯'s. Try to play D♯ a lot. Your purpose here is to get comfortable with this new note, not to move yourself with your amazing soloing — so mix it up and play D♯ heaps.

The Other Positions

The next thing you could do is find D♯ in every other position of A minor pentatonic. That means you need to first know those 5 pentatonic scale shapes we learned earlier in this series. Here are 3 more of those positions converted into blues scales by adding D♯'s between every D and E:

Back to the Exercises

During this pentatonic lesson series, we've covered many approaches to working on scales. Now that you're aware of those different approaches, you can apply them to any scale you like. Here we're using the blues scale so the amount of new material is low — it's just about adding that D♯ to what you already know.

Single Strings

In lesson 1, we practised and improvised with A minor pentatonic on single strings. Do the same with the blues scale. Here it is on the 6th and 3rd strings:

String Pairs

We can also take some of the patterns we learned on string pairs, like we did in lesson 2. Here is an example of the blues scale on the E & A string pair:

And here is another example of the same thing on the A & D string pair:

Slides

In part 3 of the series, we connected 2 positions of the pentatonic scale with slides. Here is an example of that on the G, B, e string set, using the blues scale — slide from position 1 into position 2:

Transposing

Since we've already worked on the positions of the blues scale, let's skip to the transposing ideas we worked on in lesson 5.

In that lesson we worked on one-octave 'mini positions' of A minor pentatonic scale and transposed them into different keys. Let's do that with the blues scale — using B minor blues for all of the examples:

Beyond the Blues Scale

In this lesson, we arrived at the blues scale by simply adding an extra note to the pentatonic scale. Theoretically you could add any note to the pentatonic scale to get your own hybrid scales. The thing is, you don't have to think of it as a new scale — you can just start to stretch the language you have in areas of the fretboard.

For example, take any note in the pentatonic scale and bend it up a whole-step or half step. Sometimes you will find that a whole-step sounds good, other times the half-step sounds better. The key is to use your ears — if you like it, then use it. If not, save it for the end of the gig when you want to clear the room.