Fred Sokolow Teaches the Blues Box in E for Guitar

Fred Sokolow Teaches the Blues Box in E for Guitar We’re going to jump right into some lead playing now. Still down in the first position in the key of E. I am going to show you a first position E blues box. This is the famous pentatonic blue scale that you have heard about and pentatonic just means five tones or five notes. We’re actually going to be playing more than 5 minutes if you did the bare blue scale that sounds something like this. So I’ve got five notes and then it starts repeating and so on. But sometimes you play other in between notes as well as just those five and the whole purpose of a scale is just to get you playing melodies and leaks and we’re not really strictly adhering to anyone to this particular scale. So right away, you can play or we can get sort of pretty simple in the melody to everyday have the blues using this pentatonic scale but before we do that let’s look at a couple of details. You can bend some of the notes by stretching the strings in this scale and bending notes of course it’s a real important part of blues guitar playing. It’s not going to sound like blues unless you do that. Part of the reason is that you are imitating the human voice and by sliding up and bending up the notes and you really make the guitar sing that way. On the first string, you can bend that 3rd fret loud up and on the 2nd string, same place and the 3rd string at the second fret is a really good bending place. You can do the 3rd and 2nd strings together. Also down here on the bottom string, you can bend that note. Now when you’re bending notes, there’s a lot of different ways to control it. You can bend it and then sort of mute it with your right hand so that it stops when its up at the top like that or you can bend it now that come down all the way. You can go up and down as much as you want and you can also start with the note bend before you play it and come down like that. And also, every time you bend it out you have to totally control it and be in charge of where it’s going. Another thing that we’ll do sometimes in the blues is sustain a note with a vibrato technique since if you play this A note here on the 3rd string you keep fretting the string and wiggle your hand round to get this kind of sustain. What you are really doing you slightly stretching the string up and down a little bit and just barely changing its pitch and later on we’ll try doing that while bending the string which is a harder technique but you have to use pretty much your whole arm and your wrist to get this kind of vibrato. Now, everyday I have blues. You can pretty much express the melody to the tune on only 3 or 4 or 5 notes. I must start on the third string and go. [Demonstration] Okay now, when a soloist is improvising allow them to increase. They don’t just play the melody straight like that. They can play the stuff that’s totally unrelated to the melody sometimes. But to learn these scales and to learn how to use these positions well, besides learning leaks it’s really important to learn some melodies so that you’ve got a melody up here in your head. And then you’re playing it down here on the guitar instead of kind of letting the leaks in the scales do the playing for you. I think one of the main goals on any instrument is when you hear something up here to be able to do it down here. So make sure that your melody that everyday I have a blue sounds like you’re singing version of everyday. [Demonstration] This catches anything that George Benson in a lot of other players do where you play the melody at the same time you’re singing it is a real good exercise for learning these scales. Later on we are going have some lead solos on some of these tunes where you take off and you get completely far away from the melody. But right now I want to use this blues scale to do a couple other melodies. Let’s take the old blues tune, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, that is just about every country blues players have done a version of. We can play the melody using the blues scale but this time we are kind of on the higher part of it. We are going but first the tune is-- [Demonstration] So to play right up on the top, you will [Demo] but right at the beginning there when you have to sustain then this open string. Instead of doing that I am going to slide up to the same note up here. One more time [Demonstration] I’ve written these things out in your little tab book that comes with this video and I want you to make sure that to know how to use this E blue scale to play these tunes. The third one we are going to do is one of the most famous blues tunes is Stormy Monday and the melody of the Stormy Monday is something like this. [Demonstration] So the tune by the way is associated with T-Bone Walker. He was the first one to have a hit on it. Sop you can do the melody of the Stormy Monday pretty much using same notes in this little blues box that you did on every day. I have the blues that is like this. [Demonstration] And then it repeats the phrase. [Demonstration]