For those
Yes, many blues and rock licks are cliches, but there’s a good reason for that—they sound so cool that listeners and guitarists want to hear and play them again and again.
For those willing to pay their dues and play the blues, these licks are a rite of passage and a continuous source of inspiration. They are the foundation on which a solid “house of blues” is built.
Presented here for your edification are 12 classic blues phrases, each with a certified pedigree. You can drop any of these into a blues-based progression and come out smiling. Or you can play them in sequence over a standard 12-bar blues to create one very hip solo, as we’ll do for the very last step of this lesson.
Before we dive in, let’s take a look at three blues scale patterns that form the basis of our 12 licks. A quick run through these shapes will help wake up our hands and minds.
The first pattern, FIGURE 1, is a full-blown A blues scale in 5th position. Notice that it contains the root, b3rd, 4th, b5th, 5th and b7th degrees of an A major scale. All of the licks that we’ll look at here will be presented in the context of an A major blues.
FIGURE 1
The second pattern, FIGURE 2, is a reduced version of this same scale, which includes only the root, b3rd, 4th, 5th and b7th. This compact shape, known colloquially as the “Albert King Box”—because King virtually lived there after he signed with Stax/Volt Records in 1966—is an especially finger-friendly position.
FIGURE 2
The third pattern, FIGURE 3, commonly called the “B.B. King Box” (because he spent so much time there