00:00All right, Josh Smith here again for Guitar World Magazine. Over the next few months we're
00:12going to talk a little bit about the way that I solo and the three approaches that I've found
00:17useful to expanding my vocabulary within the blues. That would be chromaticism, diminished
00:22and augmented chords, and 2-5-1 turnarounds. These are the things that I use to build bridges between
00:29chords, which to me is the difference between just playing pentatonic blues and playing notes that
00:34work over the chords and playing through the changes. When you connect each chord together
00:39you're really playing through the chords and I'm using those three bridges, chromaticism,
00:44diminished and augmented chords, and 2-5-1 turnarounds to create those bridges. So we're
00:49going to start with chromaticism. All right, so to start off I'm going to play a chorus of a blues in
00:55the key of A, a shuffle, and I'm going to chromatically link together rhythm chords so that you can hear
01:02the way that I start to hear these bridges in between chords. So it's going to be a very specific
01:06simple 12-bar blues in A with chromatic chords in between each change. Here we go. One, two, three, four...
01:22Okay, so you can hear that I chromatically link together every chord, whether it be coming down
01:47from a half step above, coming up from a half step below, maybe from a full step and using two chords
01:55to create motion. So I'm playing things like A9 and then E flat 7 to lead me to D7, and then maybe I'll
02:05play G flat, I mean G sharp 9, A flat 9 to lead me back to A9, things like that. When you start to hear
02:13those chords in between the chords, you will naturally start to want to play that stuff within your soloing.
02:19So it's a great, great exercise to play rhythm guitar like that and start adding in as much chromatic
02:26motion as you can because your ear will start becoming trained to hearing that when you're soloing.
02:31All right, so how do you start applying this to your solos? Let's take the first move within a 12-bar blues,
02:38the one to the four, right? Everybody is familiar with this move. We're going to go from A7 or A9, A dominant,
02:48to D7, and I did that by playing E flat 7 to lead me to D7. How would you spell that out?
02:56Well, how many of you have ever played this in a slow blues?
02:59Probably many of you. Well, how would you play that in a solo, in a shuffle? I'd play this.
03:18Okay, so what did I do right there? I very simply spelled out that D flat, I mean E flat 7,
03:24and resolved back to A or to the third of D.
03:37So again, I'm just thinking about connecting the one chord to the next with that chromatic move. The
03:43same way I did in the rhythm guitar, I'm going to do it in my solos and you can do this all over the
03:49place. So let's now move back from the four to the one, the next change in the blues. So here we are
03:58playing D7 and going back to A by playing A flat. Well, how would you think about that? There's a lot
04:07of things you can do. I might end up down here. It might just be as simple as one note.
04:24So I might go from the four
04:27and play something like that, which you would hear many bebop guitar players play,
04:31but really all you're doing there is highlighting that A flat and playing that. So that's,
04:47you know, again, when you start hearing this stuff as it goes by,
04:51you kind of can't help yourself. Once you've learned to play it rhythmically and you start hearing all
04:56those little movements between chords, it's going to come out automatically in your lead playing.
05:02So let's finish out the progression. We're on the V chord, which is E7.
05:08So I might play something like this.
05:12So there I'm playing chromatically both up and down by going up to the third of D
05:18and then down to the dominant seven
05:20and then playing an E chord. And then I'd do the same maybe on D.
05:28And then I'd walk back up to G. I mean to A from G. So maybe something like that.
05:43There's so many options, but again, I'm not playing anything fancy there. I'm not thinking about scales.
05:48I'm not thinking about chord tones. I'm literally just chromatically connecting the one to the four,
05:53the four to the one, the five to the four, and the four back to the one. The chords that you already know.
05:58When you start thinking about building bridges between those chords chromatically,
06:02again, all that vocabulary just starts to lay itself out for you.
Comments