00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 All right, Josh Smith here again for Guitar World magazine.
00:10 Over the next few months, we're going to talk a little bit about the way
00:13 that I solo and the three approaches that I've
00:16 found useful to expanding my vocabulary within the blues.
00:20 That would be chromaticism, diminished and augmented chords,
00:23 and 2-5-1 turnarounds.
00:25 These are the things that I use to build bridges between chords, which
00:29 to me is the difference between just playing pentatonic blues
00:33 and playing notes that work over the chords
00:35 and playing through the changes.
00:37 When you connect each chord together, you're
00:39 really playing through the chords.
00:41 And I'm using those three bridges, chromaticism,
00:44 diminished and augmented chords, and 2-5-1 turnarounds
00:47 to create those bridges.
00:49 So we're going to start with chromaticism.
00:52 All right, so to start off, I'm going to play
00:54 a chorus of a blues in the key of A, a shuffle.
00:57 And I'm going to chromatically link together rhythm chords
01:01 so that you can hear the way that I start
01:03 to hear these bridges in between chords.
01:05 So it's going to be a very specific, simple 12-bar blues in A
01:08 with chromatic chords in between each change.
01:12 Here we go.
01:13 1, 2, 3, 4.
01:15 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:18 [PLAYING CHORDS]
01:22 OK, so you can hear that I chromatically
01:44 link together every chord, whether it
01:46 be coming down from a half step above,
01:49 coming up from a half step below, maybe from a full step
01:54 and using two chords to create motion.
01:56 So I'm playing things like A9 and then E flat 7
02:03 to lead me to D7.
02:05 And then maybe I'll play G flat--
02:07 I mean, G sharp 9, A flat 9 to lead me back to A9,
02:11 things like that.
02:12 When you start to hear those chords in between the chords,
02:16 you will naturally start to want to play
02:18 that stuff within your soloing.
02:19 So it's a great, great exercise to play rhythm guitar like that
02:24 and start adding in as much chromatic motion as you can,
02:27 because your ear will start becoming
02:29 trained to hearing that when you're soloing.
02:31 All right, so how do you start applying this to your solos?
02:35 Let's take the first move within a 12-bar blues, the 1 to the 4,
02:39 right?
02:40 Everybody is familiar with this move.
02:42 We're going to go from A7 or A9, A dominant, to D7.
02:49 And I did that by playing E flat 7 to lead me to D7.
02:55 How would you spell that out?
02:56 Well, how many of you have ever played this in a slow blues?
02:58 Probably many of you.
03:06 Well, how would you play that in a solo, in a shuffle?
03:08 I'd play this.
03:09 [PLAYING MUSIC]
03:13 OK, so what did I do right there?
03:19 I very simply spelled out that D flat--
03:23 I mean, E flat 7--
03:24 [PLAYING MUSIC]
03:26 --and resolved back to A or to the third of D.
03:31 [PLAYING MUSIC]
03:37 So again, I'm just thinking about connecting the one chord to the next
03:42 with that chromatic move, the same way I did in the rhythm guitar.
03:45 I'm going to do it in my solos.
03:47 And you can do this all over the place.
03:51 So let's now move back from the 4 to the 1, the next change in the blues.
03:56 So here we are playing D7 and going back to A by playing A flat.
04:05 Well, how would you think about that?
04:07 There's a lot of things you can do.
04:08 I might end up down here.
04:10 [PLAYING MUSIC]
04:13 It might just be as simple as one note.
04:20 [PLAYING MUSIC]
04:24 So I might go from the 4--
04:25 [PLAYING MUSIC]
04:27 --and play something like that, which you would hear many bebop guitar players
04:31 play.
04:31 But really, all you're doing there is highlighting that A flat--
04:34 [PLAYING MUSIC]
04:36 --and playing that.
04:38 So--
04:38 [PLAYING MUSIC]
04:41 That's--
04:44 [PLAYING MUSIC]
04:47 Again, when you start hearing this stuff as it goes by,
04:51 you kind of can't help yourself.
04:52 Once you've learned to play it rhythmically
04:55 and you start hearing all those little movements between chords,
04:58 it's going to come out automatically in your lead playing.
05:02 So let's finish out the progression.
05:04 We're on the 5 chord, which is E7.
05:08 So I might play something like this.
05:09 [PLAYING MUSIC]
05:12 So there I'm playing chromatically both up and down
05:15 by going up to the 3rd of D--
05:16 [PLAYING MUSIC]
05:18 --and then down to the dominant 7--
05:20 [PLAYING MUSIC]
05:22 --and then playing an E chord.
05:23 And then I'd do the same maybe on D.
05:25 [PLAYING MUSIC]
05:28 And then I'd walk back up to G--
05:30 [PLAYING MUSIC]
05:31 --I mean to A--
05:31 [PLAYING MUSIC]
05:32 --from G. So maybe something--
05:34 [PLAYING MUSIC]
05:36 --like that.
05:37 [PLAYING MUSIC]
05:39 [PLAYING MUSIC]
05:43 There's so many options.
05:44 But again, I'm not playing anything fancy there.
05:46 I'm not thinking about scales.
05:48 I'm not thinking about chord tones.
05:50 I'm literally just chromatically connecting the 1 to the 4,
05:53 the 4 to the 1, the 5 to the 4, and the 4 back to the 1.
05:56 The chords that you already know, when
05:58 you start thinking about building bridges between those chords
06:01 grammatically, again, all that vocabulary just
06:04 starts to lay itself out for you.
06:06 [MUSIC PLAYING]
06:09 (upbeat music)
06:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]
