All About Blues Scales

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course. That is all about Blues scales. If you've ever wanted to dive deeper into the sound of the Blues, or if you're already playing around with Blues scales, and you want to know a little bit more about how they're made, and other ways to use them than this course is absolutely for you. Diving back to the end of high school, I was obsessed with the sound of the Blues scale to the point where when I went into my jazz program, I had to sort of unwind wanting to use that scale. It's a super versatile scale. And the way I think of it is kind of like bumper bowling or paint by numbers. Bumper bowling is when you're bowling and they pull up the rails so you can't get the ball into the gutter. Sometimes they use these inflatable tubes. So no matter what you do with the blues scale, you're going to knock down some pins. It's always going to sound kind of good, or paint by numbers. There's a picture, black and white. There's all these numbers. Number 18 is orange, so your water color, you take the orange, you painted orange, and by the time you're done, you didn't have to worry about what you were doing with any of the colors, it was all laid out for you, and it looks fantastic. Again, that's the forgiveness of the Blues scale. Once you learn it, then you start to realize I shouldn't have been trying to solo using a minor scale or a major scale off the top. If I wanted to sound like one of those rock or blues guitarists, shredding an absolutely amazing solo, then starting with the Blue scale is a great place to start. I'm creating this course, not only for blues musicians, but also for musicians studying pop, rock, sometimes hip hop, R&B, and soul. You're going to get a lot of mileage out of the scale in other genres, so I don't want you thinking that it's blues specific. You're going to learn how to take basic major and minor scales, turn them into pentatonic scales, and then further turn those into blue scales. That you understand why notes have been eliminated from the major and minor scales, and why we're adding this extra note to the pentatonic scales, known as the Blue note. From there, it's going to work kind of similar to my jazz piano improv tricks course, where I'm going to show you some fun things you can do with the blue scale, but this is not going to be my most full course on the Blues. It's really just covering this scale and some fun tricks that you can do within it. For your course project, you're going to try playing a little solo in either a blues environment or something that compliments these blues scales. Have to do a super long solo, it could just maybe be one to 2 minutes, you're going to record yourself, upload it to YouTube or Video, and supply a public link within the project resource section of this course. If you already know the blues form, or you're working on a Blues either by yourself, with a teacher or with some friends, try applying your solo over that song. But again, to be clear, because I haven't gone through the full Blues form and all of its variations. I can't expect that you do know that. So moving between C dominant seven and F dominant seven or, in fact, any one to four dominant chord progression will work just fine. So if you're ready to learn more about Blues scales, how they're how you can apply them and how they're going to help you become a better player and soloist, then you've come to the right place. I hope you have fun in this course, and I'll catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: For your class project, you're going to be playing a solo using Blues scales. You can use some of the tricks that I've given you or just noodle around and have some fun within the scales. I'm going to recommend that you do a C dominant seven to an F dominant seven chord progression back and forth and solo over top of that. Now, if you do know the blues form or you're working on a blues song by yourself, with your teacher, or with your friends, then you can absolutely use that chord progression. But because this isn't a full course on the Blues, and I haven't outlined the 12 bar blues form and its variations, I can't expect that you know that. So just simply go 1-4 or chord progression with dominant chords. So the first chord of a major scale, but with a dominant seven sound to the first chord of a major scale, with a dominant seven sound. That could be in C. Or it could be in E. It can be in whatever key you see fit. Pianists are going to love C F and G. Guitarists are going to love E A and D, and horn players are going to love you if you learn blues in B flat or E flat. But since so many of my class examples are in C, I'd highly recommend that as an easier starting point. So you could also do this as a minor blues. C minor seven to F minus seven. You have to keep in mind what scales are available for your solo. So for example, if you're playing a C major blues, your options for your right hand would be the C major blue scale, the C minor blue scale, or the G major blue scale. But if you're doing something that sounds like a minor blues, where you're choosing a C minor seven to an F minus seven, scale options B, C minor blues, F minor blues, or G minor blues. In other words, blues scales on the one, four or five. Again, feel free to review the class on super imposing blue scales. But for now, feel free to keep it super simple. A C major blues will give you the C major blues scale as your best option, and a C minor blues will give you a C minor blues scale as your best option. So as a quick example, a major blues might sound like this. All right, I almost started to go into a full blues form. But for now, again, you can just go one to four, one to four, but if you know your blues form, then feel free to use that as well. Also, if you're playing in a rock band or a pop band, you can also feel free to use a chord progression from one of the songs you're working on. Just keep in mind what your home base key is. If you're playing a pop song in A minor, use your A minor blue scale. If you're playing a rock song in E flat major, try your E flat major or E flat minor blue scales. As a minor example, C minor seven to F minor seven, you get something like this. All right. Take any of the tricks that I've given you and just play around for maybe one to 2 minutes. Make sure you record yourself doing the solo, and then you're going to upload it to YouTube or Video and supply a public link within the project resource section of this course. From there, I'll tell you what I think you executed best, and I'll also give you some areas of improvement. But one way or another, you'll get some feedback from me. I'm curious to see what concepts you preferred the, which ones you bring into your solos, and how you navigate through the Blues scale. Now, this isn't one of those go through the course and instantly record the course project. I'd recommend that you practice it enough until you get really comfortable to share something that you're proud of. Remember, don't record yourself on a day where you're not feeling it. You want to make sure that you're really ready to get in front of a camera. Your ideas are feeling fresh. You're excited to record. That's the day that you want to do this project. There's no timeline for it. There's no rush, make sure you're having some fun with it. So that's it for the course project. If you have any questions, do feel free to reach out. I'll catch you in the next class. 3. About Major Blues Scales: Let's get talking about the major blue scale. Who is it for? How is it made, and how do we apply it? Let's go through those one at a time. Who is this scale for? This scale can be used by instrumentalists that use pitched instruments or singers, and they can use it within a melody environment or a solo environment. Essentially, the solo is just generally a little bit faster or a little bit flashier, but it's all kind of the same stuff. Usually, we're talking about single notes, navigating through this blue scale with some iconic rhythms for that style, in this case, blues. So to quickly demonstrate without over explaining things yet, a solo might sound like. Something a bit faster working through that blue scale, but a bit slower. Now you can start to add words and create either a vocal melody or apply it to guitar, piano, whatever your pitched instrument is and get some sort of instrumental melody from this scale. So again, singers or instrumentalists that are looking to either create blues melodies or blues solos. Now, I say blues because you don't have to use this scale within the blues. For the most part, in the context of this course, that's how I'm going to be teaching it, but you could use the blue scale for creating melodies or solos in pop, rock, hip hop, R&B sole the list goes on. But for now, we're going to be focused in the Blues environment. How is the scale made? Well, there's kind of three steps. We want to first play a major scale. In this case, we're starting with C major. C, and then the formula is always the same for major scales. It's p tone, tone, epi semitone, ptone, apt, eptone, pasemon. That gives you a major scale. From there, we're going to get rid of the fourth note. And the seventh note. Now, why are we choosing those notes? I'm going to briefly explain why getting rid of those notes makes this scale more safe, and then we'll talk about adding one extra note known as the blue note. In the Blues, the main chord that we use is a dominant seventh chord. In this case, because we're talking about the C major scale, we're going to use C dominant seventh as our reference cord. So then we have to start to go through each of these notes individually and ask, how do they sound with the cord? I want you to keep in mind that semi tones, whether they're played like this or displaced by an octave, sound pretty crunchy. We're trying to get rid of the crunchy sounds, but we can keep tones like D and E beside each other. Still not the best sound. Again, if you displace it by an octave or two octaves, it's still kind of considered a tone for the sake of this exercise here. But we're going to consider tones more colorful. So semitone crunchy. Not so good. Tone colorful. Acceptable. So if we go back to our chord again, and we play our C major scale, we can already assume that C, E and G are going to be keepers. They are essentially in our chord and can't sound bad with our chord. G sounds fine. There's a G here. E sounds fine. There's an E here and C sounds fine. There's a C here. Let's move to the second note of the scale, which is D. So in C dominant seventh, we have this D against it. Let's see how much it rubs against these notes. So C to D is a displaced tone. And you might remember that tones are colorful. We can keep that. Let's go to the other side. D and E are also clashing. And again, that is by a displaced tone. So D is fine. It would be considered a more colorful note within the scale. So after E, in our scale, we get F, let's check that with our chord, first, playing them together. It doesn't really sound so good, but let's see what's going on. So we have E in the left hand that's clashing with that F by a displaced semitone. And when I say that, I just mean a semitone but like separated by an octave or two. And the more you separate these, the better they sound, by the way. Here's a semitone down low. If I go up here, doesn't quite sound as bad. Anyway, I digress. So we have this E in the left hand. And then F in the right hand. That interval of a minor ninth, a displaced semitone is not going to fly. It's too crunchy, so we're going to get rid of F out of the scale. We mentioned that G is a keeper. A is beside G by a tone, and it's beside this B flat by a semitone. But let's talk about why we can keep the A, even though there is this crunchy semitone that's being displaced. I didn't want to throw this all at you at once, but there's one other sort of subdivision of rule here, which is that it's generally agreed upon that a major seventh On semitone below an octave sounds better than a minor ninth. On semitone above an octave. Now, either those notes, C to B or C to C sharp, if I take the top note down an octave, we get a semitone. B down an octave, I get B to C. C sharp down an octave, I get C to C sharp. So while they're both semitones, once they're displaced and the way they're displaced can sound different. Major seventh, acceptable, minor ninth, unacceptable in this case. So, am I saying that you can never use a minor ninth in all situations? No. But for the sake of the construction of this scale, yes, we don't want to use the minor ninth. So we have this A that we can keep, because again, it's clashing with the G by a tone, so it's colorful, and it's clashing with this B flat by a semitone, but that is a major seventh, one semitone below the octave. So we're going to keep the A. Next up is B, the worst one, because it's clashing with this B flat in my left hand and the C in my left hand. Now, C to B would have probably been acceptable, but B flat to B, now we have another minor ninth. So we're going to eliminate the fourth note of a major scale, F and the seventh note of this major scale, B in the case of our C major scale? We're not quite there yet. That leaves us with a pentatonic scale, Penta, representing the number five, because we have five different notes in this scale. And as it is sort of tradition, we will add the top note, the octave, but it's not a sixth note, it's just sort of capping off the ends of the scale. So we have a C major pentatonic scale, now we need to make it a bit blues. But I have a question for you. When you think of the blues, what emotion do you think of? Is it happy? Is it greedy? Is it scared? It's probably sad. So how do we add something a little bit sad into our scale? Well, think about a major chord, CE G and a minor chord, C E flat G. What is it that makes that chord minor? It's the middle note. In this case, the E flat. This is the tonality or the mood of the chord, and as you probably know, chords and scales relate. We're going to borrow the third note from our C minor scale or from our minor chord, same sort of idea. We end up getting C D. We're starting as a major scale that we're going to borrow the minor third from the minor scale, and we're back on track for that major sound. E, G A, C. Again, no F and no B, we've omitted those. It ends up sounding like this. You might notice at the top, I did like a little hiccup or sort of stutter. It's because we got rid of two notes and we only added one. So it's pretty customary when you reach the top to sort of repeat that top set of notes, you could just play. Here is like that once that one extra beat, so generally that little repeat at the top means that you would start and end at the same time as a major scale. So those two scales at the same time won't sound great, but to demonstrate, I will show you. Sounds like this. So they start and finish at the same time because of that little hiccup at the top. That's how the scale is made, but now you need to know how to apply it. What I want you to consider is whatever blues you're in like a blues in C, you will end up using some sort of C blues scale, at least at some point. Is it a major blues? Is it a minor blues? Well, that will determine if you use a major blues scale, or as we discuss in the next class, a minor blues scale? So C is a really safe note. If you're playing a blues in C, C is going to be a super safe note, it's going to sound very resolved. Maybe at times a bit too safe, but for the most part, it's going to be a nice way to sort of land home. So because we got rid of two of the notes that rub the most against our main chord within the blues, and you can play other chords. Of course, that's necessary, but we're considering the most fundamental chord, we're building our scale around that as a pretty safe point. That way, at least we're starting and finishing our blues with some solid ideas. So because the scale is pretty safe in terms of note selection, If you want to really wow your audience or play the scale with the most amount of flare, it's really about what rhythms you apply to the scale. You can even go really simple with some of these notes, and if your rhythm is good enough, you'll get some great ideas out of it. That being said, it shouldn't all be rhythmic all the time. Space is crucial. Consider when you're speaking how long a sentence feels and when you need to take a breath. That's generally a good time to put a little break in your solo. The last thing I want to mention is something about the blue note. Now, some of you out there might have noticed a bit of an issue. This chord, C dominant seven, and the blue note that we're adding, D sharp E flat is clashing with my E by a semitone. Now, it's acceptable because it's a major seventh. But still, for the most part, we don't want to linger there too much. If I do, we end up getting It's pretty hip, but you kind of have to work your ear into that sort of sound. So the general rule with that blue note is that it's going to sidestep or be a grace note or a slip note to one of the neighboring pitches. Okay? Does it kind of sound familiar? Is it starting to sound like the blues? I didn't play a single note outside of that blues scale, and all I did to kind of jug it up a little bit was do some of those grace notes off of the blue note. For now, a grace starting point would just be play a C dominant seventh and play around in that blue scale with some of these little grace notes off that E flat off of that blue note. Before you even start changing chords, just get really comfortable how everything sounds with your home based chord, C dominant seven. And if you don't know what a dominant seventh chord is, here's the five second explanation. It's a major chord. Find your octave up above, so C up to C and then down a tone. There it is major chord with a flat seven or major chord with a minor seven. Same deal just different terminologies. There it is. That's who the blue scale is for, how it's made, and the basics of how to apply it. Let's go to the next class and talk about the minor blue scale. 4. About Minor Blues Scales: All right, let's get talking about the minor blues scale. Again, we're going to talk about who this is for, how to create the scale, and how to apply it. Yet, again, this scale is going to be for singers or instrumentalists that play a pitched instrument, whether you're a trumpet player, guitar player, piano player. You can use this scale and get some great sounds out of it. You can apply this sound to either a melody or a solo. A big part of it is how flashy you are. I'm not saying every solo has to be flashy, but generally, solos are going to use more ideas and Play things that you might not necessarily be able to sing so easily. A melody is going to be a little bit more singable. It's going to very much consider where breaks need to be for breaths, and it's not going to be generally too virtuosic. It's going to be a little bit more bare bones. Now, you're not going to be stuck having to use a blue scale within the Blues. It sounds great in jazz. Jazz and Blues together is known as Hard Bop. If you want to hear a fusion of Jazz and Blues together, check out Hard Bop, Bobby Timmons, Horace Silver, great places to start, Art Blakey and the Jazz messengers, if you like a big band setting. You can apply this to RMB, soul, hip hop, pop, rock. And I want to re emphasize pop and rock. These blues scales sound fantastic. The Beatles were using them. A lot of huge bands were using these and many other styles. So tons of different styles, instrumentalists or singers, solos or melodies. It's very versatile. If you learn this, you're definitely going to end up using it quite a bit. It was something that I really saturated in for a long time, especially the minor blue scale. I overplayed it for years in my Funk rock band, but it was very appropriate for that style of music. It allowed me to have a very personalized connection with this scale and really understand all of its little nuances. How is the scale made? Well, now we need to start with a minor scale. Some you might know C major has a relative minor scale. Think of relative like quite literally a relative, the same DNA. How many sharps and flats do I have in C major? None. If I start on the sixth note, in this case, A, I can get my minor scale, my relative minor scale. Now, there is one other way to create a minor scale, and that is take your major scale, flatten the third, sixth and seventh notes. There are different types of minor scales, but this is known as the natural minor, and it's sort of the starting point for a lot of other variations and other types of minor scales. So because I used C major in the last class, let's take that second method and flatten from our C major scale our third, sixth and seventh notes. Now, just like we did before, we have to take a chord, in this case, on a minor blues, you would be using most likely a minor seventh chord, but here's the catch. The minor blue scale actually sounds fine over a major blues. Here's that dominant chord sound. Listen to this. Still sounds fine. But for the sake of this class here, we're going to talk about this minor blue scale over a minor seventh chord. We're going to keep our C from our C minor scale as well as E as well as G, and we're also going to keep the B flat. We get to keep four notes from our minor scale, and they actually outline that minor seventh. Now we're really just talking about the D, F and the A flat. We're looking for semitones that might clash with our left hands chord. Here's that chord again, looking at D Well, that's going to be a major seventh between this E flat and D. In other words, it's a semitone that's been displaced. Now, is it a minor ninth, the really bad sort of displaced semitone that we talked about before? No. But we're still going to get rid of it because it is still that semitone rub. But what I will tell you is that I use the ninth or the second note, this note D in this case, all the time. It's not going to give you that rub of that minor ninth. So if I'm playing something like There's that D, and it sounds to my ears, it sounds fine. So you can feel free later to add it back in. But for now, we're getting rid of the D. F is totally safe. It's a tone away from E flat, which is in our chord, and it's a tone away from G, which is in our chord. So it sort of floats between them. You'll hear a lot of artists that play that fourth note of C minor, the F, in this case, a lot like I'm overdoing it, but you can see it's still pretty safe. I just floats there. So we're going to keep the F, the A flat. That's going to be our big offender here because in our cord, we have a G. And A flat, those are semitone away from each other. But look what happens when I displace it by an octave, we get that minor nine. Again, we don't want that minor ninth sound. While the D can be somewhat forgiving out of our eliminated notes, A flat is what you might call avoid note. Just stay clear of it, and your solos and melodies will sound better for it, at least based on the parameters that I'm teaching you right now. Now, as a caveat, I want to mention that this A flat is not a note that you can never play. You can totally play. It just depends on the chord that is being played with or against. In a minor blues, generally, the second chord would be, in this case, F minor seven. If I'm in C minor, C minor is my first chord, and generally, F minor is my second chord. And look what note we get. A flat. Well, now the A flat sounds perfectly fine. You need to consider the context of what chord is being played and what notes are happening in the right hand. Now, I'm not saying play a C minor blue scale on C and then F minor blue scale on F. You could. You can't always get away with that, but the Blues is a pretty forgiving genre, and the scale specifically is a very forgiving scale. So while I have told you that certain notes are a void notes, they're not always a void notes. We're just talking about the context of this scale against what you would call the one chord. In C minor, C is the one. It's do, so it hosts our one chord, whether it's a minor seventh, dominant seventh, major seventh. If we're in the key of C, any C chord is a type of one chord. So I did want to mention that. The chord and the scale, we're just talking about the home base chord and the home base scale for now. So now what we have is the C minor pentatonic scale. To me, it kind of looks like an M. Kind of zigzags around a bit. It's a very symmetrical scale in C. So I'd recommend starting here is a great place. Guitarists will prefer you to eventually learn the A minor blues, D minor blues and E minor blues. But for now as pianists, C is a great place to start. So we end up getting this C minor pentatonic scale, but where's the blue note? We talked about in the major blue scale, how we needed to add one extra note to make it the blue scale. Well, same thing applies. We're going to add our blue note, but we already have a bit of a sad sound because of this minor third. We're not trying to make the audience cry, but it should sound a bit sad. So what can I add to sort of elevate that? Let's add something a bit sinister. So that would be the tritone. In this case, you can hear that sort of haunted sound of the tritone. We're going to add that, but again, by itself, it doesn't sound particularly great. So it's meant to scoop, either up or down. Within that scale. So moving a semitone away from that blue note is a great place to start, and then you can branch out and move further through the scale up or down. Now I do want to mention something here. Let's say we had taken the other method of C major gives us an A minor scale. They have the same notes. If we quickly go through that same process, I want to show you something about the blue note that I think is important. So in C natural minor, we got rid of the second and the six notes. If I did the same thing in A minor, I'd be getting rid of B and F, and that gives us a minor pentatonic. Now, the blue note, which is between the fourth and the fifth from our minor scale. It's a one, two, three, four, five. Here's that tritone, augmented fourth, diminished fifth, whatever you want to call it. That is the same blue note that we had. From the major blue scale. C major blues. The blue note is D sharp E flat. A minor blues. The blue note is still D sharp E flat. So you could think of the blue note as being the tritone because it's one layer deeper into this tragic sort of sound, or you could just also see it as the same blue note that you had from the relative major blues scale, right? So we had these notes for the major blue scale, and these notes for the minor blue scale. They're the same. It's the same way C major gives you the notes for A minor. C major blues gives you the notes for A minor blues or vice versa. Why didn't I teach you to you that way then? It's so quick. This whole class could have just been just shift everything down, so it starts on A, and there you have it. But I want you to understand why certain notes are being eliminated, and I want you to really feel each of these notes in the blue scale as having a function. Home base, minor, fun, colorful, sort of floating sound, relatively stable, fun little pull up to our root, and then there's a root in the blue note is a bit of that sinister flavor that you sprinkle in. With those grace notes. Okay, so that's how I think of the blue scale. Every note kind of has a special place in my heart in terms of how I visualize its stability, color, or instability. So that's how you create a minor blue scale. Now let's talk about how to apply it. Just like in the last class, I want you to really consider that if you're playing a C minor blues or a C blues of any sort, C is home base. So as a function within this blue scale, really treat C as home. Again, the use of the blue note is going to be not so much to hold its sound, but to scoop to a side note within the scale, and there's a note a semitone above, and there's a note a semitone below that are both available. So again, because this scale is so safe, you can land on any of these notes, you can start on any of these notes with the exception of the blue note, but you know its function, scoop up or scoop down. But because the scale is so safe, it's really about the rhythm. No matter what you play, you know, it's like bumper bowling. You pull up the side rails, you throw a ball, you're going to knock down some pins. It might even get boring because it's so safe. So what can you do to spice it up? Make sure that you're applying some fun rhythms. Now, this isn't a course on how to swing, but generally you don't want to play your blue scale with a straight rhythm. Maybe in rock or some Latin music or some pop, it could work, but in jazz, R&B, soul, and the blues, generally, you'd want to swing. So think of it like long, short, long, short, long, short, long. It's almost like a value of two, and then a value of one. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Once you have that, then you want to think of it like one and two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three, and four, and one. As a rhythmic fundamental, you need to make sure that you're swinging. And then from there, you want to kind of bust out some fun quick tricks, some fun phrasing tricks. We're going to be talking about some of these later within this course. But the sort of idea like Okay. So keep the rhythms funky, keep the rhythms fresh, really play around rhythmically within this scale, and you will get the most out of it. So you can almost think of this like paint by numbers. One of those books that you open up, and it's just a black and white picture that has all these numbers, and let's say 13 is green, so you use your little water color to paint that part green, and then eight is orange, so you use a different water color for orange. And next thing you know you have this big, beautiful, colorful picture. No matter what you do, if you follow those instructions, you can't go wrong, and that's kind of like the blue scale. Generally, if you're following this set of notes, within a blues, it's going to sound pretty fantastic. Over a major blues, you're welcome to use the major blue scale or the minor blue scale. Both sound fine. But on a minor blues where you're playing minor seventh chords, I would highly recommend only use the minor blue scale, the major blues. Over that minor sound sounds pretty bad, but the minor sound. Sounds absolutely awesome. There it is the Minor Blues scale. Who is it for? How is it made, and how to apply it? Let's start to dig into the details within the next classes. We've covered our basics. Now I can show you a bunch of fun blue scale tricks and ways of thinking of the blue scale, so you can get the most out of it. I'll see you in the next class. 5. b3 b7: Oh Let's start things off by talking about something really simple that you can apply within the minor blues scale. We're going to be working with C minor blues. Here's our notes. C E flat, F F sharp, G, B flat, C. I want you to really stay close to home on this one. As we're playing a C, if we go up one note in the blue scale, we get an E flat. If we go down one note, from C, we get B flat. Let's restrict ourselves by starting to experiment in this minor blue scale by staying close to C and only moving one note higher or one note lower. I'm going to create a left hand cord progression of C minor seven to F minor seven. C minor with an additional B flat, F minor with an additional E flat. In the right hand, I'm going to show you how much mileage you can get out of just those three notes. As a fun side fact, I feel like these three notes compose 80% of red hot chili peppers melodies. Anthony Keats loves this little cluster of notes. Just wanted to kind of mention that. Let's dive in to a little experimentation with just those three notes. It would sound like this. Really simple, and it works really great for vocal melodies, especially if you don't have a very wide range as a vocalist. Now, something else that's kind of fun that you can try is to play the B flat and E flat together. So this sort of and then you can also break it up from there, which would sound like this. Anyway, I could just keep noodling on those three notes. They're just so simple and yet so effective. So when I first started playing around in the minor blue scale, a lot of my soloing started from this very cozy, simple, safe sort of space within these three notes. Now, many of the tricks that I'm going to be showing you, we're going to start from the minor blues perspective, and then we're going to realize that that actually works in the major Blues environment on the same set of notes. Allow me to demonstrate. So C Major Blues. If I was to play the C with the two surrounding notes, we get A and D. You'll see it sounds fine, but the effect isn't quite the same. It's okay, but it's kind of neute. But what if I took the same notes from the minor blue scale, these notes we just had. But instead of playing C minor seven, I play E flat Major seven, the same notes as C minor. This is the relative major scale. So E flat major, we're going to try the same effect. It's not as effective as when we're playing it on a minor chord, but it's definitely better than this sort of sound in the major blue scale. So check it out. Sounds like this. And now I'm going to go from E flat major seven to A flat Major seven, a one to a four in E flat major. Sounds like this. So Still sounds fine. So you can use these three notes. I'd recommend starting with the minor blues sound because it's easy to conceptualize, okay, I have home base, up a note or down a note or potentially both if I split them. And then you can superimpose those notes over the relative major, in this case, E flat major. So I wanted to start with something simple. This is it. It's a short class. It's just these three notes, a little safe, fun starting point. So you don't have to feel like you need to be ripping these blue scale lines. You can just start with some simple stuff. That's it for this class. I'll see you in the next one. 6. Grace Notes & Open String Concept: Next up, let's get talking about grace notes and open string concepts within the blue scale. We're going to start with the C natural minor scale. We're going to get rid of two and flat six, and we're going to add our tritone, sharp four or flat five. We're back to our minor blues scale, in this case, C minor blues. Now, before I added that last note, we had the minor pentatonic scale, and then we added this note, the sharp four. This is your blue note, and it's going to be used as a grace note, a note that slides to neighboring notes. But before we get there, let's discuss how this note would sound as a starting note of a phrase and as a finishing note of a phrase. In the left hand, I'm going to place C minor seven to F minor seven as a light chord progression as we demonstrate this. Starting with the F sharp at the beginning of a line, It starts very tense, but it resolves. Now, let's finish on that F sharp. Hm. Doesn't sound so great, right? Let's try one more time. It doesn't really sound that great. So we don't really want to land on this blue note. I think of it's sort of like jokes. Like if you start a joke really poorly, but you finish it well, you might still get some laughs. Whereas if you start a joke really well and it bombs at the end, it's going to be pretty terrible overall. That's kind of like finishing on a bad note, and in this case, just be very cautious about this blue note in terms of finishing on it within your lines. Now, we're not even really thinking about starting on this note or finishing on this note too much outside of the context of using it as a gray note. You can start on it, but slide, slide up. Or slide down. And quite often when you slide up, you'll move up an extra note or two, and when you slide down, you'll then move down a note or two, generally. That's not a hard rule, but keep in mind usually. After you do these little slides or these grace notes, you'll move an additional note in the same direction. Let's listen to it in the context of a short solo. Sounds pretty bluey. But before we move over to the major blue scale, I want to talk about this open string concept in the minor blues environment because it'll help us translate it into the major blues environment afterwards. So what is the open string concept? Well, think about guitarists soloing where they're brushing through the lowest pitched string, E is the note on the guitar, and then they're slowing up on the A or D strings. So they're always brushing through an open string, which is just E that sort of resonates below everything else as they're sloing on higher strings. So in the case of C minor blues, that would give us a C down below everything else. This creates a homophonic rhythm, homophonic, meaning the same rhythm between multiple parts. One part is just droning a single note and the other part is going to be soloing. We can have our note lower, like it would be on the guitar, a nice low sounding root, or we can take that root and we can superimpose it up an octave. Instead of we could have a top C in this case. Now, it doesn't have to be an exact homophonic rhythm. I I'm going like this down through a couple of notes. I might just want to hold one C. I could play a C on everything, but sometimes it's okay to hold it for like two or three notes, especially if you're playing some faster material. So let's do a short solo, where I'll use the open string concept with low Cs and highs. Here's how it sounds. We're going to go C minus seven to F minus seven, something like this. Sounds quite nice, right. It's pretty bluesy. So it's because it comes from this open string concept on guitars, where they're either doing like slide guitar or picking individual frets, whatever it might be. But they're brushing through this open string to thicken up the sound of their solo. Now moving over to the major blues environment, we would have C major scale, four, seven. Now we have C major pentatonic, just like wind chimes. And then we're going to add the minor third. A bit of a minor sound for the blues. It makes sense it is the blues. It should be a little bit sad. So we're going to choose the note that makes our C major chord a C minor chord, the most fundamental minor sound. Within a minor scale. So now we have our C major blue scale, and we know where our blue note is. The same thing applies. You don't want to finish on the blue note? So while it still sounds tense to finish on that note, I think it sounds a little bit better than when we were in the minor environment because these dominant chords just create so much tension already that it essentially sounds like a dominant sharp nine. Sort of the Jimmy Hendrix purple cord sort of sound. But that being said, we still want to use it as a grace note. You can start with it or finish with it, but you kind of want to have it as a scooping tool. So it would sound something like this in the context of C dominant seven to F dominant seven, you get lots of scoops. The scoops just have such an iconic sound within the blues. I would say for now, overdue those grace notes a little bit, and then later you can be more tasteful with them. So now let's think about the open string concept within this environment. Okay, so if I was to choose C, my root, as my open string, I have this scoop or this scoop available, and I'm really close to this s that I'm droning, or I have a high s, and now I'm really far away, so these stretches get quite uncomfortable. Maybe you could use two fingers. But it's just not quite as comfortable as the stretch that we had in the minor environment, which was more like a fourth or a fifth. So what if I just took the same notes from my minor blue scale, and I used those over top of this major environment of C dominant seven to F dominant seven. So this works two different ways. The first is the parallel minor, and the second is the relative minor. Don't worry too much about the terminologies, I'll take you through it. So the parallel minor is the minor scale that also starts on C. It's the C minor blues, the one we were using before? Parallel because the scales run parallel with each other. You could play a C minor and a C major scale at the same time, and they would run parallel with one another. If I do all the same tricks for the minor blue scale that I showed you with the open string, it would sound like this. As a general rule, that's going to show you right away that on a major blues where you're using dominant cords in your left hand, the minor blue scale sounds fine. Feel free to use the C minor blue scale over a C major blues. You can also use the C major blue scale. This is going to bring us back to the point of this relative minor. What's a relative minor? C major has all the same notes as A minor. So it's almost like their DNA is the same. It's like they are relatives. So A minor is our relative minor of C major. C major Blues has this set of notes. A minor blues will have the same set of notes. So let's use this A minor blues and the open string concept within the A minor blues as we're playing over a C major sort of sound, C dominant to F dominant. Okay, now, A is going to be our root, and we're going to Scoop. Just like we did a moment ago from our grace note, but we're gonna pair up some as above or below. It sounds like this. Sounds pretty cool. The thing to keep in mind is that when you're using the relative minor blues, it's going to sound a little bit more major because you're playing all the same notes as the relative major as C major blues. You're just focused a bit more on these As. When you use the C minor blues, the parallel minor, it's going to sound a little bit more minor in nature. It's going to have a mix of major and minor, but in a way that isn't too conflicted. Again. To me, it just sounds cool. And then we have the other option. A little bit more major sounding. To recap, when you're in the minor environment, use your blue note to scoop up or down, quite often continuing in the same direction, and you can pair a root above or below whatever you're playing to create this open string sound. In a major environment, we're not using a major seven chord. We're going to use the dominant seven chord, which is very common within the blues. You can either use the same tricks we just did for C minor blues, which sounds fine or the relative minor blues, in this case, a minor blues. And that also sounds great. Just a little bit more major sounding. So that's it on grace notes and the open string concept. I'll catch you in the next class. 7. Slingshots: Next up, let's get talking about something that I call slingshots. Is that an official term? No. Have I used that term for many years, and my students have been able to easily recognize what it sounds like? Yes, so let's talk about it. Basically, what you're going to do is, again, we're going to start in the minor blues scale environment. We're going to take and again, see minor blues. We're going to take the third note F, and we're going to some tension into the blue note before going through all the notes to the root. Okay, so it's a longer first note. Pull the slingshot back to the blue note and then the rock or whatever is in your sling shot gets fled, flung, whatever the word is. You can repeat this first note a few times, which can sound quite cool. In context, it would sound like this. So that's it. Now, breaking that down rhythmically is going to be like triplets inside, pairs of eighth notes, and it gets kind of complex. So instead, you almost want to verbalize it. D D da. D D da. D D D da or whatever the ending might be. Instead, if that doesn't work, what we can also do is, I'm just going to play through it with a snap so we have a bit of a grounded rhythm, and I want you to try to join me. If you're not at your instrument, get to it. Go to your piano and try to join along with me in two, three, four. Keep it going. A couple more. That sort of idea. You can also again, just hold it. So the first note is just held. The main point here is that the slingshot itself is quite quick, when you hold o. Ba Ba. That sort of idea. So again, what we can do is when we were in C minor, we were playing this slingshot down to the root of the minor blues. But if we're in the relative major, in this case, E flat major, where the blues scale notes are the same, but now it's a major blues scale, we would use the same slingshot as we did in the minor. So starting on F, Okay, so it feels like there's a lot of focus on the sixth of E flat major, C. But again, we're thinking of it as C minor blues. So when we do a slingshot in C minor, we're focused on landing on the root. When we're in the relative major, we're focused on landing on the six. But I don't think of it so much like that. I just think of it as the relative major and relative minor and how those work together. Now, again, with dominant chords, for example, C dominant seven to F dominant seven, same thing applies as the last class where you can do parallel or relative parallel being C minor blues. Which sounds fine. Or the relative minor, which is A, So the C minor blues scale slingshot or the A minor blue scale slingshot when you're playing within a C major blues. And generally in a C major blues, your chords would be C dominant seven F dominant seven, and G dominant seven. So when you're in that environment, you can still be thinking of the minor blue scale to help you out. Now, slingshots don't have to be in that exact spot. I find they work really well there. But take any note. Let's say we're back to a C minor seven chord, and I'm playing the flat seven That would be our sound. We have the B flat, pulling back the sling shot to a C and then rolling down through notes. Now, you could include that blue note, but I just went pentatonic just because there's the right amount of notes, otherwise, I'm landing on that F sharp or adding an extra note, which feels a little bit too kind of clunky and congested. Okay, now I had to cross a finger, so the fingerings for all of these different slingshots that are available can get a little bit overwhelming. There are tons available. But what I would say is do what feels right. If you're used to practicing scales, you've probably recognize that longer fingers play up on black notes and shorter fingers play on white notes, and you should be comfortable crossing fingers at this point. That's why have my longest finger up on this black note, a finger, down a finger. This is a bit of a stretch. You could go to two and one. I like the feeling of one and two. I'm very comfortable with crossing, so it all depends on you and your comfort level. So you could even go through just the pentatonic scale and start on every note and do a slingshot. It would sound like this. And you could add the blue note, but just watch when you land on it, it would sound kind of bad from time to time. It would sound like this. The concept, you play a note, you pull up one note in the blue scale, and you fly down three extra notes. That is the slingshot pulling back and releasing. If you're not used to playing fast stuff within the blue scale yet, this is a great jumping point because it's in a nice tight hand position for the most part, and the concept can be broken down so that it makes sense. We're moving up a note and then down three. And the rhythm can be kind of loose. You can play around with your own slingshot rhythm. This is the one that I like to use, either holding, or double tapping and then slingshotting. But feel free to explore and experiment and see what you can come up with yourself. Sling shots were never taught to me officially. It's just sort of the way I visualize this rhythmic sort of figure. So I hope that it makes sense to you. I really hope that you get to use it within your improvs because it's one of my favorite things to throw in when I'm improvising, within the Blues. I hope you have fun with that and I'll see you in the next class. 8. Phrasing 3's: Next up, let's talk about phrasing threes. There's lots of ways that we can apply phrases of three within our blues scales, both major and minor, so let's cover that. What is a phrase? Oftentimes you'll see these legato slurs over notes, these little rainbows. As long as all the notes are different, then that would be a phrase marking. And you can think of a phrase sort of like a sentence. At some point when we're speaking, we need to take a breath, and quite often it makes sense to do that at the end of a sentence. A phrase works the same way. It makes sure that we're not rambling too much in music and that we're taking breaks from time to time to make the melodic content that we're creating digestible to the listener. Phrases could have five notes or seven notes. Generally, it would probably be about ten to 12 notes or under. That's a guesstimate, but you don't want to go too long with your phrases or you will lose the audience's attention. It becomes like a little kid trying to tell you a story and the rambling and the rambling and the rambling and at some point, you just stop listening. Breaks are a good thing, and that's super important whether you're writing melodies or solo. So a phrase of three notes in the blue scale might look like or or just a little pocket of three notes, they don't have to be beside each other, like what I'm doing. You could go or just choosing three notes from the blue scale, and then another three notes, and then another three notes. And now you're working really just with phrases of threes. Now, I'm not talking about triplets. Now, these phrases could work as triplets or as eighth notes. You could find other ways to make them work, but I think those are the two most effective ways. Triplets would be three notes per beat, one, two, three, four, one, two, or three, four, one, two, three, four, and then some way to break out of it. You could also use eighth notes, one and two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three, and four, one and two, and three and four, and one. So you can do triplets, you can do eighth notes, you can go descending, you can go ascending, or you can start to randomize it. It won't sound like phrasing when you're randomizing unless you accent the first of each phrase. So if I go one and two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three, it just sounds like I can't really hear the threes. But if I start going, and accenting da da da. Now you can really hear those groups of threes. So again, in context, one and two, and three, and three. Four, and one and two, and three, and four, and one, two, and three, and four, and one. Triplets or eighth notes both work. You can also do this in the context of the minor pentatonic or the blues scale. Personally, I find this works a little more easily within the pentatonic scale, but you can also do it in the Blues scale one of two ways. Again, the pentatonic scale has no F sharp in this case, so you're just doing phrasing three without the F sharp. If you want to include the F sharp, you could do it the exact same way we just did and play some F sharps, but it won't sound quite as effective as the second way. Let me show you both. Still sounds fine, but we're lingering a little too much on that blue note for my liking. Now let's try it with grace notes. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. It's a little bit more tricky because you're going to have those grace notes, which now feels like four notes, but the grace note should just feel like tripping into a note. One, two, three. Okay? Also, I find that I tend to accent that sound quite a bit when I'm playing. So when I'm phrasing the threes, I kind want to accent at times when I shouldn't. So just keep in mind it's a little bit more mental control to make that work. So far we've been doing this phrasing threes in the minor environment, it also works in the major environment. One of two ways. We can move to the relative major. In this case, E flat Major seven would be our main chord. So that sounds fine. That's again, the relative major to our C minor blues, but we could also experiment with the parallel major. C dominant seven to F dominant seven. We can try it with triplets. Triple triple triple triple triple triple triple triple or eighth nodes. We can try that out as well. One, two, and three and four, and one and two, and three, and four, and one. Now, if this is too tough off the start, one thing I would recommend is clapping both of these different ways that you're going to be playing, you're phrasing threes. Triple, triple triple, triple. If you get a stomp going at the same time on all the main beats, triple, triple, triple, triple. Relatively easy starting point. But now if I keep that stomp going, one and two, and three and four. We're going to clap on one and two, and three and four, but accent, in other words, play louder, every three, I want to say beats, but it's half beats. So one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three, and four, and one. It'll take 3 bars to line up so that the accented one that you're counting lines up with a one that's being snapped. Now at the piano, If you're just playing one chord, that's a great place to start, and then eventually, you want to be able to work on your chord switches. Let's start with just one chord. One, two, three, and four, one, two, and three, and four, one, two, and three, and four, and one. Now let's try switching. Every four beats, the left hand is going to switch from C minor seven to f minus seven. That sounds like this. On n two, three, and four and one, two, and three and four, and, one and two, and three, and four, and one. And then from there, you can expand your chords more going into longer chord progressions or maybe changing your chords every two beats. So phrasing threes works over major pentatonic and major blues scales. It works over minor pentatonic and minor blues scales. You can do patterns that are ascending, descending, or chaotic and moving all over the place, but just make sure that you're accenting every three notes. In other words, playing loud, soft, soft, loud, soft, soft, so that if you are playing really randomly, you can still feel the phrases of three. Let's put this all in the context of a solo. We're going to start with C dominant seven to F dominant seven. It would sound like this. So it was just a little short burst of those threes. All right. So that's the basic idea. There's a lot of ways you can apply it and I've broken it down, so many different ways that I'd recommend trying it each way and see what resonates with you the most, what you find easiest as a jumping point. We've gone over the major, the minor, the ascending, the descending, and the randomization of these phrases of threes. I hope you get a lot out of that trick. I tend to use it quite a bit, and it doesn't stop at the blues. You will hear this in popic, rock usic. It's definitely a technique worth learning because you'll get a lot of mileage out of it. I hope you enjoyed this class on phrasing threes, LLC in the next class. 9. Fast and Flashy: Let's talk about a fun rhythmic trick that you can apply to your blues scales, similar to slingshots, but different. What we're going to do is we're going to play a note that starts at the top of our line. Again, we're in friendly old C minor blues at this point. Let's start on a high C, and we're going to be working our way down through a few notes. You're going to play a triplet. If you don't know how triplets work, this is more of a thing, but we're going to be playing an eighth note and then a 16th note triplet, and then a bunch of eighth notes. It sounds like this. Now, you can variate this as many ways as you want, but let's talk about the basic version to start. We're going to play any note from our blue scale. In this case, we're starting on C, and then we're going to move down a note and then back before we move down two times. Just get used to that feeling. A S to speed it up. I would be that kid when I was practicing this stuff that I would drive my parents crazy with repetition to the point where it's like, Okay, put on some headphones. I'm thankful I always played keyboard because I would do this for like 15 minutes. Now you're getting annoyed, right? But do that. If you're practicing is so repetitious that it's a little bit annoying to someone else listening, you're probably doing something right. So join in with me. Do this a few times. Let's see if we can slowly speed it up. If you can't keep up, that's okay. You got to put in the time. If you're keeping up great, we're still speeding up. It's about as fast as you probably want to go. After you've done that, you're going to go down two more notes. Could be from the blues scale or the pentatonic scale. Now in this minor blues scale, I really like these little triangles, off the root and the fourth is where you'll see me doing this sound the mot. Now, before you start moving this rhythmic figure around, like on the first note of the scale and the fourth note, just try it on the high root and work down through the entire minor blues scale. It would sound like this. Maybe you're in a different key, maybe you're in E minor. That might sound like this. You'll have to change the fingering based on what you're comfortable with and based on what key you're in. So just keep in mind, play around with it until you find the fingering that works for you. In the context of a solo, let's try a C minor seven or and an F minor seven d. It might sound like this, starting with just some random playing. Okay, you hear that little fast piece? So I'm trying it from different spots of the scale. I'm throwing in some grace notes. Things are really starting to sound bluesy, and this is where you really get digging into that blue scale. I get a lot of students that'll be like, No breaks, just playing around, and that's a great place to start. But how do you go from there to playing some fast and flashy rhythms? Well, I hope that this rhythm is something that you can get some mileage out of, as well as the slingshots that I talked previously. Now, again, there's two ways we could apply this same minor blue scale to different chords. We could have C dominant to F dominant. Now we're in a major blues environment, but still playing the minor blues. You could also do this on the major blues, but the C major blues has the same notes as the A minor blues. Think of it like A minor blues. That. See that little slingshot there. There it is. So how about that was the rhythmic figure I'm teaching you now. And then a slingshot. So slingshots pull up a note and then descend quickly. Was this rhythmic figure just starts from a top note and zig zags its way down. I stutters its way down, and then you can choose to fall down through some more notes after that if you see fit. So again, for those of you that work visually with sheet music, it's like an eighth note, 16th note triplet, and then some more eighth notes depending on how long you want to extend that line. Really get good at this stuff, force yourself to do some solos where you're using this rhythmic device maybe two to three times within a solo or more, but you want to make sure that you're not resorting back to the tricks that you're used to playing. You might say to yourself for the next two to 3 minutes as I'm soloing, I'm going to try to use That little rhythmic trick as many times as I can. Feel free to overdo it. If you're practicing, it's not like you're in a live performance environment, and no one's going to judge you and say, you did that trick too many times. The time to do these tricks too many times is when you're practicing. I highly recommend put some accountability on yourself and say, All right, I have to do this trick x times when I do this solo through, let's say a page or one head of a song. Make sure that you're using this trick a bunch so that you can use it a little bit within your solos for some awesome rhythmic flare. I hope you enjoyed this rhythm that you can add to your blue scales, LCU in the next class. 10. Top Note Down: This next class is relatively short because the concept is pretty easy to grasp. I'm going to give you a minor blue scale example that stays true to the minor blue scale, and then I'll give you a major blue scale example that does deviate a little bit outside of the notes of the blue scale, but I still think it's definitely worth exploring. If we go to our C minor blue scale, and just look at the first five notes. What you might notice is that the first note, the second note and 345, the fifth note, create a minor chord. We have this unique opportunity to move the top note down by semitones and stay true to this minor blue scale sound. What we can do is play a minor chord descending, lower the top note by a semitone, and then do that again all the way down through the three notes. Now, I like to finish on the E flat instead of the C. It sounds a little less like an exercise. But that still sounds fine. You can play around with the rhythm, whatever it is. Play around with that rhythm, have some fun with it. But that's it. That's the trick, just taking a minor chord and whatever minor key you're in. So we have this, let's say a bit of sort of sound established. Kind of sounds a little bit big bandish almost. I could picture a horn section doing a line like that. But that's it, like I said, super simple minor chord with a descending top note, you can finish on the E flat, the C, you could even finish halfway through if you wanted. You can play around with different rhythms, but it's a really simple trick that you can definitely get some mileage out of. Now for the major blue scale, yes, we do have this chord in the first five notes of that scale. We still do have our major chord in this case. But we don't really have that available top note to move down. Now, what if we borrowed the blue note from the C minor blue scale, this F sharp, and we're going to use the blue note. From our C major blue scale. Now, this one's going to be a little bit more blocked. It reminds me a little bit of like old saloons or some of the old Mario songs. But if we play the top two notes down to the thumb, lower them by a semitone, down to the thumb, lower them down another semitone, down to the thumb, and then you could play something that's like a little sort of closer out of that sound. You'll see Oscar Peterson doing this a lot, who is a really famous jazz pianist. One of the best. He does these sort of double blue notes where you're moving down to the blue note from the minor blue scale, as well as the major blue scale. This is also common in some blues endings where you get this sort of In my right hand, I'm moving through the F sharp, the minor blues scales blue note, and in my left hand, I'm moving down through the E flat, the major Blues scales blue note. Same time. You get a very timely sound. We're condensing that into this. To recap, whatever key you're in, let's say it's C minor, you play a C minor broken, descending, lower the top note by a semitone, and then lower it again. I suppose you could do it the other way. Which might also sound really cool. So you get to determine which way you want to do this trick, but they both are available, or maybe back and forth. Now it's sounding kind of scrambled but still very much blue. Then for our major example, let's say we're in C major. Left hand plays a C dominant seven chord, which is very common in the blues to use a dominant sound within a major blues. My right hand is going to play a major chord built off that same root built off of C. I play the top two notes, then the bottom note, the root. I lower the top two notes by semitone, and I play the root again, and then I lower them by one more semitone. From there, you can either just play your thumb one more time or find some way to sort of close off that sound with a little blues line. Like I said, this class is pretty short and sweet, but there it is a little minor blue scale trick, and a major blue scale trick, as well, that stays all within the first few notes of your blue scale. It's simple, but it's effective. I hope you enjoyed that, and I'll see you in the next class. 11. Zig-Zags: Oh. Another simple concept coming your way. We're going to talk about zig zagging through the notes of a pentatonic scale. Let's start off again with C minor pentatonic scale. Again, the pentatonic scale is very similar to the blue scale, which is what I'm currently holding down, but it doesn't have the blue note. Doesn't have the tritone, sharp four, flat five, whatever you want to call it. So it's like a minor scale with no two and no flat six. That's the other way to think about it. We're going to take just these notes for this next concept. You can do the full blue scale, but I can almost promise you you're going to enjoy the sound more with a pentatonic scale. These zigzags can work up or down. Let's start with our C minor pentatonic scale, where C is our bottom note, and we're going to start zigzagging. We move up two notes in the minor pentatonic, then down one, two, down one, up to, down one, up to down, so on and so forth. It also works descending. C, down two notes in the minor pentatonic, up one, down, to, up, one, down, to, up, one, down two. Now, by itself, I can sound quite great. But if you apply a fun rhythm to it, it can sound even better. It might sound like this. And then again, you'll notice I'm breaking out of the pattern. Generally, when you're using any of these sort of tricks within the blue scale or the concepts that I'm showing you, you want to do them sparsely and then find some way to wrap it up. With the blue scale, adding the F sharp back in, it might sound like this. I still sounds okay, but when you get to this part here, it just gets so cluttered. So, again, I think the minor pentatonic is going to be a little bit of a better sound. Now, this is a course on blue scales. What do you do in showing me pentatonic tricks, Josh? All kind of the same. You're just omitting a note. If I told you, play this trick with the blue scale, just don't play the F sharp. If you never knew what a pentatonic scale was, you wouldn't say to yourself, but this is just a pentatonic scale. You would think of it as just a sort of variation of the blue scale. So again, there's three ways that you can apply this. Over a minor seventh chord, play a minor pentatonic scale on the root of that chord. So C minor pentatonic. In this case, you can zig zag up or down. That's kind of up to you, and again, variate the rhythms. It also works in C major blues. And again, we're using a dominant chord totally acceptable. And that sounds fine as well. Lastly, you can go to the relative major, E flat major, and that sounds great also. Notice when I'm demonstrating a lot of these concepts, I'm just moving from a one chord to a four chord. A flat Major seven to the fourth note of E flat major scale, which gives us a flat Major seven. When I first started improvising, a lot of my right hand ideas were played over top of a simple one, four, one, four chord progression, and then you can expand those chord progressions into some of your favorites. If you don't have any favorites yet, I have lots of courses on chords and chord progressions, so do feel free to check those out. So there it is zig zagging through the pentatonic scale or the blue scale, but probably the pentatonic scale because let's be honest, it just sounds better. You can zig zag up, you can zigzag down. You could even try larger leaping zigzags somehow. So let's say I had C G C from the C minor blues, then E flat B flat E flat from that same scale. You could come up with a sound like you can start to experiment with this stuff and feel free to have your own take on it, whether you're changing up the notes that I'm showing you or whether you're changing up the rhythms. Just try to make sure for the sake of learning your blue scales that you're staying within the notes of the blue scale as much as you can. That's it for Zigzag, LC, in the next class. 12. Pentatonic Dyads: Let's get talking about pentatonic diads. Firstly, what is a diad? Well, if you know at this point that a triad is a three note chord, tri representing three, a diad is a two note chord, but it's not really a chord. It's just an interval, the distance between any two notes. Now, is this a common diad? Not necessarily. Diad are usually within an octave or so. A really common diad that you'll see is a skip or a third like moving up through a major scale. In thirds or down through a major scale in thirds. However, in a pentatonic scale, there are some notes omitted, which means we won't always get skips or thirds. So to review CE, GAC is our C major pentatonic scale. C skips d up to E, D skips E up to G, remembering there is no F, so it's not even an option. So now we have a quarter already d to G five semitones. That's a perfect oar. E skip g to A is a quarter, G skip up to C is a quarter, and A skips C up to d is a quarter. After that, We're back to C to E, just like where we started. So if I break up each of those, C to E, D to G, E to A, you end up getting zig zags, which we've talked about before. But in this class, I'm going to encourage you to try these blocked. This sort of idea. Sometimes it can sound quite cultural, like indigenous music, oriental music, or if you swing it like Irish jigs. Like for example, when it's played blocked, So do you recognize that? Do you see what I mean? But if we just play a little piece of it within a solo, it can kind of sound more jazzy and colorful. Check this out. Doesn't sound so bad. You want to want to do this with the blues scale. Once you start to add in that blue note, you'll get quite a bit of dissonance. You're also going to get some really crunchy shapes like D skips D sharp up to E. That's not quite the diads that we're looking for. We're looking for something a bit more harmonious, so these thirds and fourths sound great. Now, if playing something like this is a bit too off the start. Because of the notes you're not allowed to play, it takes a bit of practice. Then what you can do is just stay around one area. C to E, D to G, and then maybe down to A and D. This sort of maybe down one extra. That kind of idea, though, you're staying close to one area, really saturating in that spot of the scale, and then expanding from there. While in the major pentatonic scale, we start with the third and then have a bunch of forests. Let's talk about the minor pentatonic scale. Going to go down to A because A minor pentatonic has all the same notes as C major pentatonic. So now we're starting A skips C up to D. Remembering there's no b in this scale. It's not even an option. So we have a fourth to start, followed by the third C to E, and then the rest are going to be all fourths until you reach A to D at the very top. The same philosophy applies. Maybe in this case, we're playing an A minor seven to a D minor seven, just stay in one area. So it's not quite sounding bluey or jazzy at this point. I think where you're really going to get the most out of this trick is just a little sparse amount within a solo. So something like. Something like that. Another thing that can sound kind of cool is this sort of rainfall effect, something kind of like this. So you can play around with it. Again, if you're good with this blocked version, you'll be better at the zig zags, and if you're good at the zig zags, you'll be better at this blocked version. Remembering that the zig zags is essentially just playing this shape and then this shape and then the shape, but broken. Then then you can continue that on. So that's it. For pentatonic diads. Remember to be sparse in the way that you use them, and they can add some really fun jazzy color to your solos. Now, while this course is on the blue scale, like I mentioned, I think the pentatonic is going to work best for this particular trick. And after all, the pentatonic is still notes from within the blue scale, just a little bit more restricted without the blue note. Do try out your pentatonic diads and see how you like them. I'll see you in the next class. 13. Quartal Harmony: Next up, let's talk about how quartal harmony relates to your blues scales. If you're not familiar with what chortal harmony is, let's briefly discuss. Usually in chords, we have a note and then some a third, either a minor third, three semitones, or a major third, four semitones. And then another type of third, maybe three semitones or four semitones, it all depends on the type of chord. There are these major thirds, four semitones, and minor thirds, three semitones. But there's only one perfect fourth. You can have an augmented fourth and diminished fourth. You don't see them very much, but when we're talking about fourths, it's generally five semitones. C one, two, three, four, five. I've moved up five, and there is my perfect fourth. If you have two perfect fourths stacked, five, five, then you have something called quartal harmony. Now you might notice that these three notes are true to the C minor pentatonic or blues scale. The C minor blue scale has a C and F and a B flat. Are there a few spots where we could play a quartal chord and stay true to our minor or major blues scales? That's what we're going to be discussing in this class. We can build ortal harmony off of the root, the fourth or the fifth when we're in a minor key. We're back to C minor seven F minus seven. I could play these chords blocked a very colorful sound. We can play them broken. Ascending or descending. You have some options. So one that I really like is ascending, move to the next shape, descending, move up to the next shape, ascending, descending, which can sound very disorienting, but you're never really leaving that blue scale. You're playing notes that are true to it, but it sounds a little more jazzy. This is again, one of those sort of gray areas where jazz and blues fuse together. Again, on a minor pentatonic or blues, you're thinking, cortal harmony built off the root, fourth and fifth. You can play blocked, broken ascending, broken descending, Or you can again, play them ascending, but moving down or descending and moving down. From there, you can just start to come up with tons of variations however you see fit. Now, when we're in a major blue scale environment, the scale degrees are going to be different. Again, I'll use C dominant seven for our chord. And what you'll notice straightaway is that the first chord satisfies the root and the flat seven, but the fourth here, that's not an acceptable note. It's not in my major blue scale. So again, if we were to filter chordal harmony that only plays notes from the major blues scale, we would have scale degree two, three and six. I'm talking about the major scale when I say that, by the way, like C majors second, third, and sixth note. So think of it that way. We have two, three and six. So again, we can go up through our broken shapes, ascending each shape. We can go up through them descending each shape. This one's a little bit trickier. Or we can descend through each shape as we're moving lower. Make sure that you prep the shape before you play the broken. Otherwise, it just feels like a jumble of notes, or we can go down through these shapes while ascending our broken pattern. And again, you can break this up, either ascending, descending, ascending, descending, or even play your outside notes followed by the inside note. There are so many ways you can break this up. I would recommend highly that you start with all of this blocked, and you can even do homophonic rhythms, which sounds really cool. That would sound like this. So I'm just by, by, by, smashing both hands in the same rhythm and moving my right hand around. T through some of those different chortal shapes. So that is chortal harmony within the context of pentatonic or blues scales. If you want to sound a little bit jazzier within the middle of a blues solo, this is a great trick to try. And again, you're saying true to those pentatonic scales. So at the end of the day, it still feels like you're in that blue realm, but getting a little more colorful, a little more jazzy. I hope you enjoyed that trick. Do try those out, blocked. And then all the different variations that I just showed you, whether you're moving up through the shapes or down through the shapes, playing each shape ascending or descending, you have tons of ways that you can apply your chordal harmony within the context of your pentatonic or blues scales. I hope you enjoyed this class, and I'll see you in the next one. 14. Superimposing Blues Scales: Let's get talking about super imposing blues scales. What do I mean when I say super imposing a scale? Well, we talked about this in jazz piano improv Trix one with our pentatonic scales. Now we're going to extrapolate things into blue scales, and I'm going to give you even more options. But what do I mean by this super imposition? It's just the idea that we're thinking of a Blues, for example, in C, but we might be playing a blues scale. That's centered around F. There's going to be three solid options for major and three solid options for minor. Let's start off with talking about superimposing blue scales while you're in a major blues. Let's say we're in C Major Blues, and we're playing a C dominant seventh chord. Well, so far, the options that we've talked about would be the C major blue scale, which is the most obvious. Technically, the C minor blue scale also works as well. Now, that's not fully a superimposition at this point because we're still focused around C, but already you have two options. Let's open things up a bit by giving you three other blue scales that you can play over that C dominant chord. Now, one thing that I want to mention is that you're going to have to get comfortable bringing back F. F is a bit conflicted against this chord. But out of the two notes that we eliminated in the C major pentatonic scale, which were F and B, the B is worse because the B conflicts with my B flat and my C, it's kind of like playing all three of these notes at the same time. Was the F is only really conflicting with my E in the left hand. It still is conflicted, just not as much as that sound there. So if we can get comfortable hearing this F against our C dominant chord, then that really opens things up. Starting on the fourth scale degree, in this case, F is a great place to start. We can play a major pentatonic scale off of that note, and let's analyze all the scale degrees in relation to my left hand. So we're starting on the fourth note of C. So four, five, flat six into the major six, our root C and our two or our nine D. These are almost all really safe notes. The F, not quite as much, and the A flat while it's not necessarily as safe, we can call this a flat 13, which on a dominant chord can sound really nice. But again, the function of this note is the slide either to the six, in this case, a very safe note, or down to the five, another very safe note. So why are we able to get away with this four if we got rid of it before? Well, the idea is, it's going to sound a bit conflicted, but if all of the other notes work so well, and we only have one conflicted note, then the balance is still really going to lean towards consonants or good sounding solos. So to give you an idea, it might sound like this. All right, colorful and a little bit different than our usual C major blue scale. Next up, we can also try again on the fourth scale degree, the minor blue scale. So what we end up getting is the fourth scale degree. Again, we're going to just sort of brush over that for now. It's not terrible, but it's not the best sound in the world. This flat six or flat 13. Why does this work? Well, a flat 13 on a dominant chord is a upper extension. And after all, a dominant chord is meant to represent tension. So for now, we can get away with this, but we need it to resolve soon. And there we go. The next note in our F minor blue scale is the flat seven from our home key, a nice resolved sound. Moving into the blue note, this is a bad sounding note. But And that's subjective, by the way, but you're going to be able to move down to that flat seven or up to the root, which is really nice. And then we get our minor third from our home key. But we're playing a dominant seventh chord. So we're thinking of this as a sharp nine. So we have a sharp nine and a flat 13. This is almost functioning kind of like an altered scale, but not quite. And if you don't know about altered scales, they just work really well over dominant chords and create a lot of fun tension and colors. So to quickly demonstrate how it would sound, let's start to see major blues. Here's the F minor blues. So it's a bit more outside of our usual note selection, but it still works. And lastly, over this dominant chord, we could play the minor blue scale off of the fifth scale degree. I think this one works the best. Let's get talking about it. Our scale degrees in relation to our left hand are five, which is consonant, sounds nice, flat seven, sounds nice, our root. And then we have the blue note on our really wacky note, the sharp one or flat two. Pulling into this ninth, and I love the sound of nine, or it's pulling down to that really safe route. And then again, we have that fourth, like I said, you got to get comfortable with it for these superimposed the blue scales. And then we're back up to our route. So, again, we only have one note that sounds a bit off, but now we have access to the ninth, and I really love that sound. It would sound something like this. It almost sounds like we're soloing in the home key. It's pretty close. It has a lot of similar notes, but generally, it just sounds really colorful and really awesome. Now, we're going to move over to a minor blue sound, but I'm going to give everything away right now in that we're going to use the same three scales over top of our minor seventh chord. Let's get talking about them. So now the four doesn't sound so bad. All right? This four sits atone between our fifth and our flat three. So here's F. It's not too close to these other notes from our C minor seven chord. So it's super acceptable. Let's get talking about the F major blue scale and how those scale degrees relate to the left hand chord. So we have C minor seven in our left hand, and the F major blue scale would give us the fourth acceptable fifth The flat six as a blue note into the six. Let's talk about that briefly. This flat six is going to sound pretty conflicted. But again, it's the blue note. It's not a resting spot. We're just sort of scooping through. Of course, scooping down to the fifth is very safe. It's in our chord. Scooping up is going to give us a little bit of a Dorian sort of sound, a minor sound with a major six. So this is a great way to make a blue scale, sound a little bit more jazzy. We're up into this major six followed by the root, and then the ninth, and then we're back up to this F again. This is going to sound particularly good. Let's try it out. Ooh. Sounds nice. And now, just to be clear, you can also think of this as the minor blue scale built off of the two. It's all the same notes. But do you want to center your sound more around the 11 or the four? If you do, think of it like the F major blue scale. Or do you want to center it more around the nine? If you do, then think of it as D minor blues. It's all the same tricks, it's all the same stuff. But the way you perceive the scale that you're playing might help you accent certain notes. Next, we have the F minor blue scale. So let's relate our F minor blue scale to C minor. We're starting on the fourth scale degree, again, this is safe through the flat six or flat 13. This is not a particularly great sound, but if you use this note to move to the next note in our blues scale, which in this case is the flat seven of C minor, then it sounds resolved. F through the A flat up to the B flat or B flat through the A flat down to the F. So we're on this flat seven. Next up, we have the blue note, which is B. B conflicts with B flat, and C, doesn't matter. We're not supposed to stay here for too long. We're scooping down to that flat seven, a very safe note, or up to the root, an extremely safe note. Next, we have the minor third of our home key followed by the fourth yet again. Now, before, that minor third was called a shark nine over the sound of a dominant chord. I love this sound by the way. Very tense, very colorful. But over a minor seventh chord, now it sounds more resolved. So this F minor blue scale sounds particularly great over a C minor chord. Let's try it out. Sounds like this. Sounds great. Sounds colorful, a perfectly solid option. Lastly, we're going to talk about the minor blue scale built off the fifth, in this case, G. Let's relate our scale degrees to C minor yet again. We have the fifth, which is safe, the flat seven, which is safe, the root, super safe. Flat nine is the blue note, so it doesn't matter if it's conflicted because it's resolving to the nine or down to the root. I'd love the sound of a nine, as I mentioned. So this is a great sound, especially on minor chords. Back to the fourth and up to the fifth. These are all super safe options, so this is going to sound particularly great. Let's try a short solo built off of this G minor blue scale over our left hand, C minor seven. Sounds like this. So those are great options to start, but they are not the only options that exist out there. I encourage you to play a major seventh, a minor seventh, or a dominant seventh chord in your left hand and run through every single blue scale major and minor that exists. And ask yourself, which ones are outlining the color tones and the safe tones that you prefer the mot. By safe tones, I'm referring to the chord tones And by colorful tones, I'm talking about the other notes within the scale. Like, for example, I really like the sound of a nine. Maybe you really like the sound of a 13. So you might gravitate toward superimposing different blue scales than myself. But I wanted to give you enough options to get started. You have three blue scales that you can superimpose over a dominant or a minor seventh chord, and don't forget when you're slowing in a major blues, you're able to use the major blues or the minor blues. It's just very forgiving that way. So that's it on superimposing blue scales. Have fun with that. You'll get tons of mileage out of it, and don't forget to apply it. So often I'm playing a solo, and I get really focused on what the roots of chords are, but it can sound so great to do this super imposition. Have fun, superimposing your blue scales, and I'll see you in the next class. 15. The Riff: To wrap up some of these blue scale applications, I'm going to show you one of my favorite tricks. This was also included in the second jazz piano improv trick course. I like it that much, but I'm going to do a whole fresher video on it. So we might cover some slightly different angles to this same concept. So it sounds like this. What am I doing there? Let's break it down. This is a trick that I use almost exclusively in the minor blue scale environment, but you can try it the same in a major blue scale environment. Let's talk about both. You're going to be simply moving down through your minor blue scale, whatever it is, let's say it's C. Now at the same time, you're going to be moving down through the notes of your C minor. Or if you're in the e minor blue scale, it would be an E minor chord. Whatever the root of your blue scale is, it's the same relative chord. So I'll start with my left hand on C, and as I start to move down through that minor blue scale, I'm going to join in with my right hand on that E flat, left hand down through the blue scale. Both hands move down, right hands, playing another chord tone, C, G A flat. C. T. Now, when I'm playing this in my right hand only, I'm playing sum, two and four, sum, two and five, um, two and four. And then again, sum, two and four, sum, two and five, sum, two and four, sum. We haven't talked a lot about finger numbers within this course, so keep in mind, it's one, two, three, four, five. Doesn't matter which hand, sum is always one, Pinky's always five. So you can play around with the rhythm of this. It doesn't have to be this sort of static data. You can have whatever rhythm you come up with dua du ta. Or whatever rhythmic figure you might want to play around with. In this case, the left hand can be c minus seven to f minus seven or C dominant to F dominant. Remember the minor blue scale works over a major blue or a minor blues so you can get away with both. So let's try it over these dominant chords. All right, try to put some of the tricks together for you guys so you can see how this all starts to compile. So I've tried this over C minor seven F minor seven. Check that box. It works. I've tried it over C dominant seven to F dominant seven. Check that box. It also works. I'm going to move up to the relative major, in this case, E flat major, represented by an E flat Major seven, and then A flat Major seven. Check this out. Also sounds fine. Again, for context, if I'm thinking C is the root that I want to be playing, I could play C minor seven to F minor seven. That's all minor. I could play C dominant seven to F dominant seven. Now I have major in the left and minor in the right, or I could have the relative major one to four forward progression, E flat major seven to A flat major seven, and then that same trick would work in this major environment. We've got it working over minor seventh chords, dominant seventh chords and major seventh chords. You just have to watch where you're placing those cords in relation to the scale that you're working with. Some of these keys are going to be more forgiving. I really like playing this riff in C minor. I find some other keys pretty difficult, just in terms of the fingerings. If that's the case, and you find that you're tripping over your fingers, just slow the riff down. It could sound like this. Like simple, sporadic. At the same time, you can just linger in some of these areas like So taking little pockets of this riff and sort of variating it and keeping things more simple. So essentially, we've mixed a blue scale and a chord at the same time where the chord is playing a bit slower down through these notes, and the blue scale is simply just moving its way down through the notes consecutively. That's it for the riff. I'll catch you in the next class. 16. Outro: Congratulations on finishing this course on Blue scales. Now you should have a better understanding as to how blue scales are created, how they work and the best ways that you can apply them within your solos. These scales will give you tons of mileage within your soloing and within your melodic lines, whether you're playing in a blues band, a rock band, a pop band, and it also spans over many other genres. Forget you do have a course project. I want you to make sure that you review the class, outlining all the details on that project. But in short, you'll be recording yourself, doing a solo, using the Blues scale, and then uploading it to either Video or YouTube and sharing a public link within the project resource section of this course. I want to give you some feedback on your solo, so make sure you submit the project so I can help you If you want to learn more about me and my musical journey, you can head over to Cook Hyphen Music dot C, where you can check out my music portfolio, my bio, and so much more. If you want to learn some of the solo piano music that I've created and kind of see what I'm doing as a composer, you can head over to Cokusic dot store. Also, if you want to check out my video content on YouTube, you can find me at youtube.com slash at Cook Hyphen Music. On my YouTube channel, I post passion projects, Extra educational material, and recordings of myself performing my solo piano works. If you want to find me on social media, you can head over to Instagram or Tik Tok and find me at Let's Cook Music. On social media, it's a bit more of the behind the scenes with sprinkles of what I do as a composer and as a teacher. I want to thank you for taking this course because the more students that take my courses and enroll and engage, the more excited I get to create more course content for you, so it becomes this fun feedback loop of you inspiring me and hopefully me inspiring you. I hope you have fun applying the material that you've learned from this course, and I'll see you in the next one, happy Practicing.