Beginner Guitar Lesson 28 - The Blues Scale

Welcome to another exciting step forward in your mission to become a skilled guitarist!

This time we're going to refer to our pentatonic scale, and add just two more notes to it between the G and A, and the A and B.

E G G# A A# B D E

The green letters mark the open strings while the red letters mark the added notes.

This is called the “blues scale.” We can play this scale through three octaves in the first position as illustrated by the notation and TAB below. Again use a down-up alternate picking pattern. The fingering on the fretting hand is the same as the fret numbers, so that makes things simpler to remember.

The five notes between G and B are all one fret (or one semi-tone) apart. This is known as a “chromatic passage.” Notes that are only a semi tone apart, which is the smallest distance between notes in western music, are referred to as “chromatic.” So we can say that the blues scale has a chromatic passage within it.

The blues scale is often used in guitar solos, although it has been commonly used in modern pop rock or funk to create “riffs.” For example, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers have built many of their riffs on the blues scale. For our first exercise today I want to focus on getting this scale under our fingers.

Following the tab and notation above, play one note per beat and pick in an alternate down-up motion. Start at 90 bpm and work up to about 150 in increments of 5 bpm. This should take you about 10 minutes or so.

Great! Now you are familiar with the blues scale, so let’s make a cool riff out of it, using some of the chords we have learned so far. We’re aiming for a sound that is quite heavy and funky, a bit like the Chilli Peppers. The rhythm is a bit quirky with lots of off beats, and the chord changes are quite quick, but by now you should have enough experience to be able to pull this off by just watching the camtasia example and playing it yourself. (Camtasia file link goes here).

We have supplied the notation and TAB below, too. Fingering for the fretting hand is the same as the fret numbers in the tab, except where you see chord symbols A7 and B7 in green. For those notes, use the regular fingering covered in earlier lessons.