Dont underestimate the blues

Recently I started learning how to play blues lead guitar in depth, working my way through the pentatonic scale shapes, blues licks and much more, and with out exaggerating in any way I can tell you it has revolutionised my soloing skills. It has improved my solo and improvising skills big time and taken my phrasing up to the next level, and this is for more than just blues soloing, this applies to rock, metal, ballads and a lot more styles of music. So if you want to be a great lead guitar player the first advice I will give you is to learn to play the blues.


Not so long ago blues was all the rage, it was the music every on loved, and it touched people hearts in a way that no other music had done before, and like every other popular music genre people started to play along and it began to evolve. Blues led to rock n roll, rock and roll became hard rock and hard rock became heavy metal. Music had changed a lot over a short period of time, but the roots were never forgotten.


Many rock and metal guitarists use blues heavily in their soloing, including Eddie Van Halen, Angus Young, Kirk Hammett and Slash. But the more I learnt about blues the more I realised those names are just the start. The blues is every where.


The easiest way to show you this is to tell you to learn the blues and see it for yourself (In fact I think every lead guitar player should learn it any way), but I will try and explain it as best I can any way.


It seems the two most common scales used in lead guitar are the minor pentatonic and the major scale, these are the two scales every one seems to know. These are also heavily used in blues, especially the minor pentatonic. And to be honest I did not really realise this until I learnt blues. Loads and loads of great solos run on this simple little scale, even Dave Mustaines solo in Holy Wars, Which is a high speed aggression power house, runs along it, including the blue notes that add that extra dark feel. Its not a blues solo, but several elements are there and I am almost positive Dave must have learnt some sort of blues along his guitar journey. 


The structure of blues is also very strong in a lot of rock and metal soloing. Blues is often made up of a selection of small licks and phrases tied together in creative ribbon. It doesn't just run in one constant burst or long run, moving up and down the scale in different directions. It makes sure every little bend can be heard and every single note expressed to the very maximum. You can hear this same structure in almost any guitar solo in the 1970's and 80's. Just play some blues, then play some rock and here it for yourself. Some good examples of this are Am I evil? by Diamond Head, Randy Rhoads solo in crazy train Crazy Train and Marty Friedman's solo in Lucretia, by Megadeth.


If you don't want to learn blues for the sound, learn it to get some idea of how to structure a nice solo.


I feel the quality and quantity of great guitar solos has declined as blues has slipped out of fashion. Even though the hero's of today's young players learnt there trade through blues, the young guitarists are not learning it so much, so the solo's are just not the same. So if you would like to be able to write great guitar solos like any of the guitarists mentioned, and many others, get started by learning to play the blues, it will open your eyes and revolutionise your guitar playing. If you want to sound like your hero's don't just learn their material, learn the stuff that inspired them to. It just makes perfect sense.


Blues is not every thing in rock and metal soloing, but it laid the foundations, and today's guitar work would not be the same with out it.