12 bar blues – Spice up your patterns with triplet rhythms

Hi there,

Thanks for taking the time to read my blogs 🙂 Feel good about posting comments / questions, any other subject matters that people would like me to blog on.

Just to let you know i’ll be eventually adding some audio clips/ videos but they’ll be uploaded to my blogger page soon (www.jsmusicschool.blogspot.com)(as wordpress charge for mp3/ video uploads)

This blog (and the next one) will help beginner bass players to really start to mix up your 12 bar blues patterns with different rhythms. So using these new rhythms in conjunction with various arpeggios will give you more options/variety.

Below I’ve got 3 basic 12 bar blues progressions in A Blues. (the arpeggios are Major 6, Major and descending major bass line at bar 12 of each pattern)

Pattern 1 is ‘straight’ quavers :

Pattern 2 we’ve got a traditional ‘shuffle’ feel where each beat is split up into triplet quavers (1 + a, 2 + a, 3 + a, 4 + a). Each beat has 1 note lasting 2/3rds of the beat (1 and the +) and the 2nd note on the ‘a’)

** this is stated by the triplet 8th note feel sign at the top left hand side**

Pattern 3 is based on the triplet quaver structure of 3 notes per beat but the + is a rest. This provides you with another variation and choppy feel.

Practice these at various speeds with a metronome 🙂

Next blog will look at varying the rhythms within each bar!

Many thanks for reading.

James Schofield

Twitter: @jsmusicschool

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jsmusicschool

 

Essential Blues Bass lines!

Hi there,

Thanks for reading my blogs – I’ll shortly be moving over to Blogger as I can upload Videos for free. I’ll let everyone know once I start moving things over!

So in this blog we will cover some cool essential bass lines that all bassists should know. They are also extremely useful for blues guitarists as well as can be played around with on guitar in different ways.

Our first cool bass line is based around a major 6th arpeggio. An arpeggio is where you are playing notes from a chord sequentially.

Let’s take an A6 arpeggio for example. It would contain:

Rootnote =  A

Major 3rd (3) 2 tones = C#

Perfect 5th (5) 3 1/2 tones = E

Major 6th (6) 4 1/2 tones = F#

The pattern we’ll use to start with will go like this (we’ll also include the octave (8) )

A   C#  E   F#  A   F#  E  C#

1   3    5    6    8    6   5   3

To get a nice groove going play 2 swung quavers per note. I’ve transcribed a 12 bar blues pattern using the same pattern above using A6, D6 and E6 arpeggios.

Pattern no.2 is using Dominant 7th arpeggios. These would contain:

Rootnote : A

Major 3rd (3) 2 tones = C#

Perfect 5th (5) 3 1/2 tones = E

Minor 7th (b7) 5 tones = G

Using the same playing pattern as with the Major 6th’s we’d get the following in an A blues progression:

You can also mix the 2 up to produce a bass line with a root, 3rd, 5th, 6th and b7:

Practice this in every key and play along to backing tracks online. There a millions of great blues backing tracks on Youtube you can use.

Also you can randomise the pattern so instead of going 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 6, 5, 3 you can jumble them up to create different options and sounds.

Hope you’ve found this blog useful.

You can find other excellent free info via the Jsmusicschool twitter feed @jsmusicschool @harvey_jsmusic

Many thanks

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

James

 

Adding Dominant 7 Arpeggios to Blues Improvisation

Hi There,

After my last post on ‘Understanding the Blues’ you are now aware that the Blues scale works great over Dominant 7th chords despite the note clashes.

Now what you can also use on top of that is Dominant 7 arpeggios.

An Arpeggio is essentially playing the notes that make up the chord sequentially (one after the other).

So an E7 chord contains the notes E,G#,B and D – this also makes up the 4 notes in an E7 arpeggio.

What arpeggio’s do is provide you with an additional set of notes to work with as well as the Blues scale which create different sounds.

So the E blues scale is E, G, A, Bb,B and D

an E7 arpeggio is E,G#,B and D

So you’ve got the G# in addition to the Blues scale.

Now in terms of coming up with riffs – play for example your E blues scale (first shape) over an E blues progression (E7,A7 and B7)

Then come up with a riff using an E7 arpeggio (in the CAGED system this would be the E shape) over the same sequence.

What that gives you is 2 different sound banks to work with – the Blues scale with the G is more Minor sounding and the Arpeggio more Major with the G#

So you want to see them as slightly different things but at the same time both work great over any blues progression.

To integrate them both into your playing – practice using a few notes from the Blues scale and then switch to the arpeggios.

It’s best not to overlay the Arpeggios onto the Blues Scale as there will be too many notes – Blues remember is all about feel so keep it simple!

Thanks for reading

James