Almost all guitarists that I work with want to know more. They want to learn new scales, more theory and more complex ideas.
Of course this makes sense and is brilliant. And as you advance as a player, learning these new elements will push your playing forwards.
One of the biggest mistakes that I see amongst players however, is placing too much emphasis on what they are playing, and not enough emphasis on how it sounds. They put in huge amounts of effort to increase their knowledge of theory, and yet they struggle to bring this theory to life in their playing.
The main reason for this, is that they are neglecting their technique. They simply aren’t doing enough to breathe life into the notes they’re playing, and so their solos lack the vocal and expressive feel essential for the blues.
At a structural level, the blues is a simple genre. Blues songs are usually based around a simple 12 bar blues progression made up of just 3 chords. And blues solos are typically focused around the minor and major pentatonic scales.
This means that if you want to prevent your solos from sounding repetitive and predictable, you have to get inventive with your technique.
And to do this, I recommend getting granular. Work on getting as much life as you can from any given technique, and try to come up with as many variations of that technique as possible.
So when bending for example, don’t just bend once or twice and move on. Think about all of the different ways you can get more mileage from your bending. Think about altering:
- The pace of the bend
- How far you bend (a semitone, tone, two tones etc.)
- Whether you cut the bend off at the top, or allow it to return to the starting point
- Which type of bend you use (pre-bend, unison bend)
You can alter each of these elements individually to begin with, and from there can begin to experiment with combining different adjustments at the same time.
For example, you could practice playing a pre-bend where you bring the note down very slowly, and then switch to letting the note come down very quickly.
If you take your time with this, you’ll be amazed at just how many different ideas you can create with a single technique.
Once you feel comfortable getting granular with a single technique, you can start to experiment with combining techniques together.
I illustrate this from around the 5 minute mark in the video above, where I start to combine bends, slides and pull offs together.
As you can hopefully see, suddenly the number of options you have in any given position increases exponentially.
So, if you have struggled with your solos lacking the expression and vocality of your blues guitar heroes, dig deep into your technique.
Temporarily shift your focus away from learning more material, and instead look at what you can do to extract as much as possible from small groupings of notes.
This is simple in theory but challenging in practice. So take your time working through this, have fun creating as many variations as possible and don’t be afraid to make some mistakes as you’re experimenting! 😁
