4 Note Blues Solo

Simple Blues with 4 notes

There's lots of little tricks you can learn to make playing the blues easier. One of them is to find places on the fret board where you can grip a few notes and wring the blues out of them for all they are worth.

Here, Griff Hamlin has several free videos (you need to sign up for them) that will teach you several tricks that will have you playing some hot blues guitar licks in no time at all.

Click here to watch Griff's '4 Note Blues Solo' video

He also has a great Blues Guitar DVD course called Blues Guitar Unleashed. It's pretty good but not suitable for a beginner. You need to know all your bar chords first.

The 4 Note Blues Solo

The 4 note blues solos uses 4 notes. Two notes on the 1st string (E) and two notes on the 2nd string (B).

The notes are a fragment of the 'pentatonic' scale. (Most blues players use pentatonic scales a lot.) They also use the 'blues' scale which is just the basic pentatonic scale with an extra added note. The added note is known as the b5, or flatted 5th.

Major & Minor Pentatonic Blues

He also has a video showing how to swap between major and minor pentatonic scales. This trick works very well, especially over the 'tonic', or '1' chord in a '12-bar-blues' chord progression.

For example: If you are playing a blues in 'A', use the A Major pentatonic over the A (1) chord and the A Minor pentatonic over both the D (4) chord and the E (5) chord. Works a treat. Eric Clapton uses this trick a lot!

Click here to watch the 4 notes blues solo video