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But you don’tLearning to play the blues in a jazzy style means stepping outside the minor blues scale and exploring other melodic options in your solos.
But you don’t need to go very far to find a cool-sounding scale that can jazz up your blues solos in no time.
In today’s lesson, we’ll be looking into the mixed blues scale, which combines the notes from the minor and major blues scales to outline the underlying blues chord changes, while retaining a healthy dose of the blues at the same time.
Major and Minor Blues Scales
To begin, here's a quick review of the minor and major blues scales, written over an A7 chord in the example below. The minor blues scale contains the notes R-b3-4-#4-5-b7, and the major blues scale contains the notes R-2-b3-3-5-6, so they share a few notes and have a few different notes between them.
The notes they share are the root, b3 and 5th, while the other notes are different between the two scales; minor blues has the 4, #4 and b7; while the major blues scale has 2, 3 and 6.
Try playing both of these scales back to back over an A7 chord, with a backing track if possible, in order to hear how they both sound when applied to a chord such as A7.
Mixed Blues Scale
Now that you've looked at both of these scales separately, we’re going to combine the major and minor blues scales in order to build what I like to call the mixed blues scale.
This scale contains all of the notes from both scales, R-2-b3-3-4-#4-5-6-b7, and has a sound that outlines the chord, since it has the R-3-5-b7 arpeggio built into it, and remains bluesy with the b3 and #4 at the same time. While you could play all of these