Adding a Major 3rd to the Blues Scale Part 1

Rob Schumann: The subject of this tutorial is adding a major third to the blues scale and this is has important applications in blues. In fact, you can't really be a convincing blues player without knowing how to do this. As people are first getting into playing rock and blues lead, sounds that here people are using a regular blues scale but playing something like this -- and that could be very puzzling because it's just a six note scale but descending that, it sounds like it has a million notes going by and part of the reason that that sounds so exotic is that we are adding that major third in, just by adding that one extra note to the six note scale, makes it sound a lot more unexpected and give you sort of flurry of notes. So we are going to look at how to do that, we will start off in this familiar box that everybody is used to and then we move around on the neck and get the rest of them in.

So in this case I am in A blues starting on the fifth fret of the sixth string. It's important to be able to find our scales within the blues scales we do. So let's talk a little bit about the blues scale formula and then how to count up and find those notes. Any blues scale has the formula one, flat three, four, flat five, five and flat seven and that just repeats and so if we count up with that we can always find that flat third note.

So going up we will have one, flat three, four, flat five, five, flat seven, one, flat three, four, flat five, five, flat seven, one and flat three. So our flat thirds would be our eight fret of the sixth string, fourth fret of the fourth string and eighth fret of the first string. To add that major third all you have to do is to go to the next fret up. And generally when you go up to the scale, this actually doesn't sound that good.

Alex Lifeson: Now Tom Sawyer's probably one of the most popular songs, it was on the Moving Pictures record that one was done in 1980, I think. This song is in the key of E and the first chord is apart E at the seventh fret. So --


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