Now I want to look, I want to view with you kind of the next stage from the T-Bone Walker style and we’re going to be talking about the great one himself B.B. King who I have the pleasure having see when I was way back in my college days and I had the enjoyment to see him grow in his career to tremendous success and he deserves every bit of it because as an artist he is also in my opinion continued to progress and advance. His thing very special but it’s also shared with people like the late Albert King and Freddie King it’s either all of the king but the king family non of them I don’t believe are related but we’re as with T-Bone we we’re talking about the slow blues I’m but to put my pick up switch in the middle so I’m getting both pick ups and work on some shuffles, you know B.B. just getting in the mood here. That’s the B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King thing, now Albert I’m not going to get to much on the Albert style verbatim first of all he was left handed, second of all he had the strongest fingers this side of Hendricks he would for example if he was in the key of C if he would playing with us now, okay theirs your tonic also I think he tuned his guitar different but anyways on one string he probably do nearly and octave or most of an octave scale like I’m here on the sixteen fret of the second string and I’m working off this blue note, this minor third blue note E flat down to C and Albert would bend up to the fifth, up there I’m not going to do that cause even if I we’re able to that we have to interrupt this video for me to change strings but just be aware that Albert was doing some great stuff with the bending and Freddie too, you now Freddie is extremely he had this Texas thing was extremely inte4legent in his choice of compositions he didn’t just do blues to a bar, he would do things we’re he would kind of start on the four cord a lot of times his compositions. They might also stay on the one chord for a longer than usually time period but Freddie had a real nice way of bending on the third and second strings but you know very well the third, second strings on that two to the same intervals that has to say the space between notes and a scale as all the other ones.
So where as if I going to lay my first finger down across the eight fret of string two and one I get that sound, if I move it over and covered strings three and two still on the eight fret I get that it’s like a more mellifluous chord, two note chord and of course if I work of this blue note is E flat in the key of C I can do some nice bending. Nice thing on the E flat and the G remains constant and sometimes now here’s one way of doing this next thing, this next thing I’m going to take this up and go up a whole step which is means going up two frets. This is kind of a real sexy way of expressing this idea, you hear this a lot in blues, it’s like this seventh, it’s a seventh chord thing to a four chord thing to the one but when you do it this way, it sounds real precise and almost pianist but if you bend and in this case I’m using my second finger of the left hand, next in my third finger on string three and two respectively so I get this thing and it’s interesting thing to know that this kind of bleak became extremely popular when I was going up and I believe Chet Atkins legend has it, I have to ask him Chad Atkins who played a particular very hip country rock solo and one of the Everly Brothers records that use this bleak and I’m sure he got it from one of the king’s. Anyway it’s a great device their another way to do it if you especially have unwound third, I don’t have an unwound third but that shouldn’t stop you from being funky you can still be funky and bluesy and so forth with a wound third, you can pull it away from you, you can almost pull the second string off the next but you’ll get a little unexpected sound that I kind of like it’s in sound of the string going off the neck. Theirs not wrong with that, that’s all part of the package, now when your working out of this position your kind of lock in to it and theirs really not a problem with being lock in to that because in this level of blues playing so much of it is just in the mood that is to say, same scale same note your creativity is within that structure of the pentatonic scale so it’s okay to just stay on that position and work out all night if you can develop the imagination to get so rhythmic things going,. You might be going up we started out with the shuffle but same tempo different feeling we can do the straight eight thing.
It’s interesting to know that so much of this is really and expression of a minor scale this is part of the mystic beauty of the blues in my opinion because a lot of times your chord people are going to be playing like a seventh chord then there going like in that tune by Little Richard who is a real obvious example. You get one guy doing that and you get one guy doing this, he’s not playing everything the same velocity his going—
[Demonstration]
The lead guys going like—
[Demonstration]
You get yourself a real kind of almost baroque type of counterpoint going just on the blues because each instrument supposing it’s just three guitars playing has their own little niche worked out. Notice the registers, the guy who is playing the low C lick is in this reg so his down in the bottom, this guy here playing the C7 rhythm is in the middle register and then the lead guys up on top and that’s how you stay out of each other ways. Of course it’s the responsibility of the lead guy to really use that imagination and with notes and his disposal really get creative within that structure, I said it before I say it again this level blues like so many levels of improvisation based on blues is really we’re talking about freedom within the structure, you have to develop your freedom within that structure you don’t want to start going outside of the line to this point, go outside the lines later on when we get beyond the Miles Davis etc., It’s all blues.
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