If you just take a moment to ponder it, you can probably think of a couple of your favorite guitar solos. The ones you are thinking of are probably your favorite because of their strong melodic lines. Stevie Ray’s ‘Texas Flood,’ Santana’s ‘Europe,’ B.B King’s ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, and ZZ Top’s ‘La Grange’, are all terrific examples of extraordinary, melodic solos.

In Marko Karhu’s course, Melodic Blues Soloing Guidebook, you’ll focus primarily on learning to craft your own compelling, melodic solo. This involves getting out of the blues box, which can come as a challenge to some. But, the tools and fresh concepts Marko gives you are just what you need to overcome these obstacles.

Here are nine video blues guitar soloing lessons from the course. For the full course, check out Marko Karhu’s Melodic Blues Soloing Guidebook on TrueFire!

Melodic Blues Soloing Guitar Lesson – Q-Q-A – Concept 1


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I learned the concept of the “question-question-answer” approach to a blues progression from Scott Henderson. It’s a great way of keeping the audience’ attention.

Melodic Blues Soloing Guitar Lesson – Straight 16ths On Shuffle


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A great tool to create some rhythmic variation or tension is to play a straight 16th melody on top of shuffle groove. So, this one has triplet feel. Switching between both forms of timing can be somewhat of a challenge.

Melodic Blues Soloing Guitar Lesson – Henderson’s Q-Q-A – Introduction


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Here’s a shuffle in G using the question-question-answer method that I learned from Scott Henderson. This means we’re trying to play the way we speak. We play a phrase that is like a question on the first 4 bars. Then, we repeat the question by playing it again on the next 4 bars. Here we may alter the question a bit, and then we play the answer on the last 4 bars.

Melodic Blues Soloing Guitar Lesson – Henderson’s Q-Q-A – Performance


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Here’s my performance of the piece so you can hear and see how it’s played up to speed. Next, we will break this one down.

Melodic Blues Soloing Guitar Lesson – Henderson’s Q-Q-A – Breakdown


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Now, let’s break this down!

Melodic Blues Soloing Guitar Lesson – Open String Theory – Introduction


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Here’s a bit of a country blues style track in E where we’re adding open strings. This makes for a really nice sound, like having little chords here and there. By using the open strings, it’s easy to change positions without a break in the phrase.

Melodic Blues Soloing Guitar Lesson – Open String Theory – Performance


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The performance of this is quick, but you can see how I transition smoothly between lines using open strings.

Melodic Blues Soloing Guitar Lesson – Open String Theory – Breakdown 1


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Let’s break down the first part of this piece.

Melodic Blues Soloing Guitar Lesson – Open String Theory – Breakdown 2


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Now, with a smooth transition because of our open string playing, we’ll break down the second part of this piece.

Digging these free blues guitar soloing lessons? Check out Marko Karhu’s full course, Melodic Blues Soloing Guidebook.