“The Blues are a simple music and I’m a simple man. But the Blues aren’t a science, the Blues can’t be broken down like mathematics. The Blues are a mystery, and mysteries are never as simple as they look!”
- BB King, interview by David Ritz
When you want to play a solo, you have to know which notes you can play. This set of notes is called a scale. It must fit to the song and the chords, not all notes on your fretboard would give a nice sound if played in one song. Looking into a music book you’ll find dozens of different scales and modes, major and natural/melodic/harmonic minor, dorian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian or phrygian mode and even more. If you want to learn more about these, look at the lessons.
The classical music theory is not well suited to describe the Blues, but we don’t have a choice. From that point of view Blues is crazy and wrong - playing dominant major 7th chords all over minor pentatonic scales, using chromatic scale pieces for intros and turnarounds, using a 5 tone scale instead of the accustomed 7 tone scales, adding notes that don’t belong to any scale - and these stupid chord progressions… so it’s only an attempt to describe what we call the Blues. Why is it so weird? It’s because the black people in the USA back in the beginning of the 20th century tried to play their African music styles on western instruments - i.e. the guitar, the harp and the piano. Take the guitar: the frets are made for equal intonation, to play classical (western) music. To get the notes “between” you need special techniques like a string bend or a slide. The best way to describe the Blues scale with standard music theory is using a pentatonic scale and add some extras.
Blues Scale In E :
This is the complete position of blues scale in E. Start at fret 3 or G chord position :
Invest your time for this scale, because practice make perfect. when practice, listen carefully to the sound of the note until you can play it effortlessly on every area of the fretboard. Enjoy 