LIVE FROM FLAT V by Josh Smith
SOLO EXPANSIONS, PART 1.
Over the next few columns, Josh Smith will demonstrate three distinct approaches he likes to take to expand his soloing vocabulary within the blues form: chromaticism, diminished/augmented chords, and ii - V - I (two-five-one) turnarounds. These are some specific devices he uses to build musical bridges between chords while moving through a blues chord progression.
SOLO EXPANSIONS, PART 1.
Over the next few columns, Josh Smith will demonstrate three distinct approaches he likes to take to expand his soloing vocabulary within the blues form: chromaticism, diminished/augmented chords, and ii - V - I (two-five-one) turnarounds. These are some specific devices he uses to build musical bridges between chords while moving through a blues chord progression.
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MusicTranscript
00:00All right, Josh Smith here again for Guitar World Magazine.
00:10Over the next few months, we're going to talk a little bit about the way
00:13that I solo and the three approaches that I've
00:16found useful to expanding my vocabulary within the blues.
00:20That would be chromaticism, diminished and augmented chords,
00:24and 2-5-1 turnarounds.
00:25These are the things that I use to build bridges
00:28between chords, which to me is the difference between just playing
00:32pentatonic blues and playing notes that work over the chords
00:35and playing through the changes.
00:37When you connect each chord together, you're
00:39really playing through the chords.
00:41And I'm using those three bridges, chromaticism,
00:44diminished and augmented chords, and 2-5-1 turnarounds
00:48to create those bridges.
00:49So we're going to start with chromaticism.
00:52All right, so to start off, I'm going to play
00:54a chorus of a blues in the key of A, a shuffle.
00:58And I'm going to chromatically link together rhythm chords
01:01so that you can hear the way that I start
01:03to hear these bridges in between chords.
01:05So it's going to be a very specific, simple 12-bar blues in A
01:09with chromatic chords in between each change.
01:12Here we go.
01:141, 2, 3, 4.
01:15So you can hear that I chromatically link together
01:45every chord. Whether it be coming down from a half step above, coming up from a half step below,
01:52maybe from a full step and using two chords to create motion. So I'm playing things like
01:58A9 and then E flat 7 to lead me to D7 and then maybe I'll play G flat 9, I mean G sharp 9,
02:09A flat 9 to lead me back to A9, things like that. When you start to hear those chords in between
02:15the chords, you will naturally start to want to play that stuff within your soloing. So it's a
02:20great, great exercise to play rhythm guitar like that and start adding in as much chromatic motion
02:27as 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
02:3812-bar blues, the one to the four, right? Everybody is familiar with this move. We're
02:42going to go from A7 or A9, A dominant, to D7 and I did that by playing E flat 7 to lead me to D7.
02:55How would you spell that out? Well, 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,
03:43the same way I did in the rhythm guitar. I'm going to do it in my solos and you can do this
03:48all over the place. So let's now move back from the four to the one,
03:55the next change in the blues. So here we are playing D7
04:02and going back to A by playing A flat.
04:05Well, how would you think about that? There's a lot of things you can do. I might end up down here.
04:10It might just be as simple as one note.
04:16So I might go from the four
04:20and play something like that, which you would hear many bebop guitar players play,
04:24but really all you're doing there is highlighting that A flat
04:29and playing that. So
04:33that's, you know, again, when you start hearing this stuff as it goes by,
04:39you kind of can't help yourself. Once you've learned to play it rhythmically
04:43and you start hearing all those little movements between chords,
04:46it's going to come out automatically in your lead playing.
04:50So let's now move on to the next change in the blues, which is D7.
04:55So I might play something like this.
04:59So there I'm playing chromatically both up and down by going up to the third of D
05:05and then down to the dominant seven
05:09and then playing an E chord. And then I do the same thing here, but I'm playing
05:13the E chord. So I'm going up to the third of D and then down to the dominant seven.
05:18And then down to the dominant seven
05:22and then playing an E chord. And then I 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.
05:47I'm not thinking about scales. I'm not thinking about chord tones.
05:50I'm literally just chromatically connecting the one to the four, the four to the one,
05:54the 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.