Chicago / The Blues / Today! Turns 50
Mon, 07/06/2015 - 5:33pm
Last month in mid-June my band (the Blasters) played a couple of nights at Fitzgerald’s in the West side Chicago neighborhood of Berwyn and we were lucky once again to have Chicago blues legend Billy Boy Arnold join us as a guest artist. Sixty years ago, Billy Boy recorded his first hit single for Vee-Jay Records, including the future blues standards “I Wish You Would” and “I Ain’t Got You.”
Although just 20 years old at the time of its release, Billy Boy had already studied harp with Chicago legend John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson AKA “Sonny Boy I” and knew or had played with most of the leading lights of Chicago blues, not to mention performing on the hit single “I’m A Man” with his childhood friend Bo Diddley.
The Legendary B.B. King
Fri, 05/15/2015 - 11:52am
"His influence on so many of us is beyond words. Thank God for B. B. King." - John Patitucci
ArtistWorks is sad to hear that the legendary guitarist B.B. King has passed away, we send our deepest respect and condolences to his family. Our blues guitar instructor Keith Wyatt has shared his thoughts about B.B. King below.
We all know that no one lives forever, but it began to seem that BB might be the one exception (we never met in person, but I have always thought of him on a first-name - or initial - basis). From his first hit record “Three O’Clock Blues” in 1952 until late last year when health and age finally began to slow him down, BB lived to play and played to live, and he did outlive all of his contemporaries and many of his disciples. The King is dead, and while there is a multitude of princes, there is no king to replace him.
Best Guitar Scales for Blues Soloing
Fri, 04/10/2015 - 3:51pm
Gotcha! That title would definitely have captured my attention when I began to get seriously interested in playing blues guitar.
Among my first inspirations was the initial wave of British guitar heroes (plus Hendrix, of course), and after painfully roughing out a few solos by ear I found what seemed to be the common ingredient: the minor pentatonic scale.
When I began to gravitate toward traditional blues, I thought that it must just be a different scale blend – mix the minor pentatonic with the major pentatonic and add a flat-five now and then – but my attempts to turn scales into legitimate-sounding blues solos never seemed to hit the mark. At the same time, I noticed that traditional blues guitarists never mentioned scales – if they talked about their playing at all, they would usually say something mysterious like “I just play what I hear.”
I was confused: If blues solos don’t come from scales, then where do they come from?
It took a while, but I eventually figured out that “play what you hear” isn’t vague at all – it’s a literal prescription for how to play blues.
Transcribing Solos on Guitar
Mon, 01/05/2015 - 4:50pm
One of my students here at ArtistWorks recently asked me on the Blues Guitar School forum to name some influential solos that I have transcribed over the years. It seemed like a good topic for discussion, so here’s an expanded version of what I wrote:
To paraphrase an old saying, “if you steal one idea it's plagiarism but if you steal a hundred it's research.” In my opinion, the best way to learn a style is to emulate the masters, and learning solos teaches you not only licks, but how a great player arranges ideas over time. A classic solo will also reveal new layers as your own ear, skills, and knowledge expand, so you can keep coming back to it for new insights. In most cases I never wrote these down but instead memorized them on the guitar, which after all is where you want the ideas to “live.”
In no particular order, here’s a sample of solos that I have memorized note-for-note at some point; some I still know pretty well while others would need some dusting off, but they’re all in there somewhere.
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