In a new four-part series Josh Smith shares his personal strategies for adding interest and excitement to your blues solos.
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During my late teens and early 20s, I gigged relentlessly, playing around 300 shows per year in small clubs across the States. While that didn’t make me rich, it refined my playing and distilled my ideas down to what really works. The process of playing live helps to dispense with throwaway, average ideas and focus on the good stuff - the licks that get a reaction from the audience. In this series of articles, I want to pass onto you the blues vocabulary that stood the test of many tough audiences.
As we go, I’ll explain both the techniques being used and the musical thinking behind it. But before we dive in, here’s an overview of the musical ‘tools’ you’ll be using.
Tools of the modern blues player
We could discuss many aspects of technique but getting satisfying results generally comes down to these simple elements.
1. Feel and phrasing. If you want to get a visceral reaction from an audience, the bottom line is that you have to make your guitar sing. This can be a matter of feel and dynamics, but it also comes down to phrasing. You’ll see in the example licks that follow that sometimes I purposely limit myself to a small area of the neck, using maybe just three strings in a four-fret zone, for instance, or perhaps just the top two strings. The aim of this is to squeeze as much expression as I can from that limited space. It makes me work harder to come up with the good stuff. I also aim to use lines that mimic the human voice to inject soul.
2. Storytelling devices. Every solo should tell a story, not just be a collection of random licks. To achieve that, we can use the classic blues device of call and response phrasing, which helps give a solo a sense of continuity. We can also use repetition (the same lick with different dynamics and articulation, or played on different beats of the bar). And, most importantly, we can use the idea of developing themes that carry through a solo, gluing it together.
3. Rhythmic variation. Devices such as playing triplets over straight 4/4 grooves to break up the rhythm, playing lines organised into odd note groupings and using pedal tone ideas will immediately set your playing apart from the run of the mill. We’ll also discuss how to play lines that move through, rather than over the changes, crossing the bar line with rhythm and phrasing that make them more exciting and less predictable.
Okay then, let’s explore all these ideas in the examples that follow.
NEXT MONTH Josh continues his four-part mini series on Modern Blues Soloing
