Friday, February 24, 2012

Getting the Blues Together


Q: Been trying to learn a lot more of the Stevie Ray Vaughan blues style. Kind of plateaued. What would you recommend I do to be able to improvise like SRV and all of the Blues greats??

A: First of all, let me start with what we all do at first and how eventually we have to outgrow it. We generally start off by playing the minor pentatonic scale over the whole thing. I think this is OK when we start but you realize that this method won't work too well the first time you have to play the Blues for anything longer than ten minutes. I have to usually play two or three sets of the Blues on my Blues gig and let me tell you, your audience starts to get this glazed over look after a couple songs if you just keep regurgitating the same tired pentatonic scale licks.