Guitar for Dummies: Blues lead guitar

When you play music, there's a certain structure you have to follow. You have to play certain chords, do a certain pattern, play at a certain speed, etc. While it takes skill to learn how to follow complicated songs, it takes an even stronger skill to be able and make a song your own. That's the beautiful thing about blues. On page 189 in the section "Blues lead guitar", it states "Blues leads is the single note melodic line, consisting of a mixture of composed lines and improvised phrases" (Chappell 189). Some songs are certainly easy to play, consisting of just three chords repeatedly and that's all it requires to play. However, any guitar player should have the strength to make a song their own by improvising. Improvising doesn't meaning to start playing random notes and hoping that it sounds nice, but rather following a scale for the key of the strong.

"Don't Let Me Down" by The Beatles

As you can see, I'm playing the same chords followed by the same lick. This is how it goes throughout the whole four minute song, however by improvising I can make the guitar line of the song sound more fresh. To do this, I will have to play within the "boxes" of the pentatonic scale as the book says (Chappell 189). A box is certain notes I can play along the neck of the guitar from a certain position that all are in the same scale, which causes them to compliment each other when played together. Whichever chord I'm playing, I would have to position my hand to the root of the chord and start playing these notes. For example, in the song I'm playing, I play a B chord so I have to play the scale with the root at the B string. 

With this video, you can notice much more variation and it creates a more lively sense to the song compared to the first video. That's because those little additional notes I'm playing are all within the box, which is the picture you see above. This has impacted me because by learning how this works, I can easily apply what I know to any song if I can imagine what to add to the song in order to make it my own, which is the beauty of playing of an instrument; you can make it your own. 

Seeing that this is my second time playing a Beatles song, what is your favorite music artist and why? 

Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell. Guitar for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pub., 2006.