Learning the solos of your favourite players is one of the best ways of developing your musical repertoire.
It will help you to build a vocabulary of ‘go-to’ licks that you can use in your solos and improvisations, and develop your lead guitar technique.
When you study the solos of iconic blues guitarists, you can see how they craft individual ideas and connect them together over the course of a solo.
Over time, you can then adapt and develop these ideas and make them your own. In this way, you can learn from your favourite blues guitarists, whilst retaining your own musical voice.
There are an almost unlimited number of blues songs out there that you could potentially learn to develop your musical vocabulary.
However I am particularly excited about the subject of this course – ‘Need Your Love So Bad‘ by Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac.
Peter Green is one of my all time favourite blues guitar players, and one whom I think is greatly underrated.
Originally written by Little Willie John in 1955, Fleetwood Mac recorded a cover of the song Need Your Love So Bad in 1968. This was released as a single and added to various compilation albums, including The Pious Bird Of Good Omen in 1969.
In fact, various different versions of the song were recorded – five of which appear on The Pious Bird Of Good Omen! This includes an alternative single that was intended for the American market, but never released.
There are a number of reasons that I recommend guitarists learn this song. And these are as follows:
Firstly, throughout the song Peter Green illustrates the importance of subtlety.
Green’s playing style is highly nuanced. He demonstrates the profound impact that alterations to dynamics, spacing and bending style can have on your playing.
These are rarely the stylistic elements on which players focus. However they have the potential to totally change the quality of your lead playing.
The second key benefit of learning Need Your Love So Bad is that it helps to demonstrate how you can use the major pentatonic scale in your solos.
Compared with the minor pentatonic scale, it can be more difficult to find reference material for the major pentatonic.
This makes it more challenging to start using the scale in your own playing. You can’t so easily use the examples of others to develop your own licks.
This can then make it much more difficult to develop proficiency with the scale and to feel comfortable using it in your solos.
So if you feel confident with the shapes and structure of the major pentatonic scale, but you have trouble actually using it in your solos, this is the course for you. 😁
In this course you will learn:
- How to play the intro solo in Need Your Love So Bad
- The musical context over which Peter Green is playing, and how this impacts the scales and ideas he uses in his playing
- How to recreate Green’s famous out of phase guitar tone
- What the B.B. King Box is, and how you can use it in your playing
- How you can improvise and create musical ideas in the same style
This will help you to solo confidently using the A major pentatonic scale.
It will also develop the skills you need to create varied and interesting ideas in different keys and musical contexts.
So with that in mind, let’s get into it!
When you are ready to do so, head over to the first lesson of the course. There we will be looking at the musical context of the song and the chords over which Peter Green is soloing.
This will help you to understand how the song is constructed and how it connects with the ideas that Green uses in his lead guitar playing.
You will also learn how to play the specific rhythm part in this song and how Green moves away from the typical 12 bar blues format. See you over there! 😁
