Soloing over a song that is more complex than your standard twelve bar blues progression can be a challenge. Most players rely on playing the blues box, which works just fine… but this can leave you fresh out of tantalizing, compelling solo material. That’s where guide tone soloing comes in handy! When we rely on guide tones, we can target sweet sounding notes within the chord changes and create some truly awesome solos that move our audience. In his course, Blues Guide Tone Soloing Toolbox, Marko Karhu shows you just how to find these sweet notes, and how to use their powers for good.
Here are 5 free videos from the course. For the full course, check out Marko Karhu’s Blues Guide Tone Soloing Toolbox on TrueFire!
Blues Guitar Lesson – Little Wing: Intro
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A “Little Wing” type progression will give you a bunch of chords that seem to have no easy harmonic logic to them. You can play minor pentatonic blues over them if you want to, but adding strong guide tones will give your solo so much more character! Mixing major and minor pentatonic and adding the sus4 and 9th treatements will get you that typical Hendrix sound.
Blues Guitar Lesson – Little Wing: Performance 1
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Here is my full performance of the piece. Next we’ll break this down so you can see how I find these guide tones.
Blues Guitar Lesson – Little Wing: Breakdown
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Let’s break this down. Hendrix left us a legacy we can dissect and use to our advantage.
Blues Guitar Lesson – Little Wing Simple: Intro
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I will now show you, in an additional solo round, how you can get away with just playing the minor pentatonic scale on top of the whole “Little Wing” type progression. I’m still using guide tones, though. These are the strong notes of each of the chords in the progression.
Blues Guitar Lesson – Little Wing Simple: Performance 2
Download the tab & notation for this guide tone guitar lesson
Your solos do not need to be overly complex, but they do need to move your audience.
Digging these free lessons? Check out Marko Karhu’s full course, Blues Guide Tone Soloing Toolbox.