First Gear of the Blues: How My Wife Went From Panicking to Soloing in 4 Weeks
My wife Chelsea plays guitar. She's a vocalist first, she's got a good ear, and she's partway through the Blues Hound course on our site.
And if somebody at a jam session handed her a guitar and said "you solo first," she'd panic.
I asked her about it on camera, and her answer was better than anything I could have written. On the inside she'd panic. On the outside she'd look calm, and then she'd start backpedaling. "Oh, I like guitar, but I'm still learning." She'd downplay how much she actually knows, because she has all these building blocks and no idea how to arrange them into a wall.
If you've ever done that, ever quietly talked down your own playing so nobody would hand you the guitar, you know exactly what she's describing.
So I spent four weeks walking her through what I call first gear of the blues.
What first gear is
First gear is the foundation. It isn't everything you'll ever need to play the blues, but it's the part that makes everything after it possible, and it's the part that does the most for you fastest.
There are four pieces.
1. Know the 12-bar progression cold
Not roughly. Not "I think it changes around there somewhere."
If you can't hear the progression in your head, you're flying blind and guessing at best. Sometimes you'll get lucky. More often you'll hear something land wrong and not know why.
Here's the test. Put the guitar down. Take your starting note, and sing all the way through a 12-bar blues in one go. If you don't know what to sing, just sing the bass note of whatever chord you're on.
That's it. If you can do that, you know the progression. If you can't, that's your work, and it's genuinely mandatory. Everything else in first gear sits on top of it.
The reason it matters so much is capacity. When you're not spending your attention on where you are in the progression, you free your mind up for phrasing, vibrato, bending, timing, all the things that make it sound like music.
2. Ditch the big scale shape
When Chelsea played her baseline, she was using the big six-string-root minor pentatonic, and she said she felt like she was wandering around in it.
That happens to almost everybody, and there's a reason.
When we start out wanting to play the blues, somebody tells us to go learn the minor pentatonic scale. So we do, and we practice it up and down, and up and down, hundreds of times. Then we wonder why we're frozen inside it. We're not stuck because we're bad at it. We're stuck because running up and down it is precisely what we trained ourselves to do.
The way out is to use less.
I had Chelsea abandon the whole scale and work with one small fragment instead. A two-octave scale shape is like handing a five-year-old a battle axe and asking them to fight with it. Better to have a slingshot, something small enough to actually wield.
Two things about working with the fragment:
Be consistent with your fingering. Always play the root note with your third finger for now. Always slide with your third finger. If your fingering changes every time, moving the shape around the neck becomes much harder, because you lose the sense of it as a single rubber stamp you can put down anywhere.
Come back to the root. It's home base, even though it isn't the lowest note in the shape.
The real benefit of limiting yourself is that you're forced to choose your notes more carefully and actually listen to what each one sounds like as the chords go by. When you have every note available, there's a quiet pressure to use them all, and you end up running the scale again.
3. Vibrato, bending, and space. One at a time.
Once the shape is under your fingers, you add the things that make it sound like the blues rather than like notes.
Vibrato. Bending. And leaving space.
That last one is what people mean when they tell you to "work on your phrasing," which is advice that means nothing until somebody explains it. At the basic level it just means play less and leave gaps. Vibrato helps here too, because holding a note forces you to slow down.
The important part is doing them separately. Put the jam track on and work only on vibrato for one pass. Then only bending for the next. Then only space.
Chelsea did exactly this, and told me about it the following week. She downloaded the jam track from the course at 100 beats per minute and went through it three times, one focus per pass. That's the method working as intended.
You only get to think about one new thing at a time. Do it over and over until it stops needing your attention, then move to the next one. Eventually you have enough capacity to hold all of them at once, but not on day one.
4. Start playing over the changes
This is the last piece, and it's where it starts sounding like you're playing over the changes instead of alongside them.
Inside the fragment you've got your root, your lowered seventh, your lowered third, your fourth, and your fifth.
When the 1 chord is playing, emphasize the root. When the 4 comes around, know where it is and land on it. When the 5 arrives, go to the 5.
It feels mechanical the first few times, and it should. You're being deliberate about something that will eventually be automatic. Do it enough and your ear starts going to those notes on its own, without you steering, and at that point you can play whatever you like and the chord changes will still be audible in your solo.
If you can't manage the bends and vibrato while you're thinking about all this, don't. Treat yourself like a bass player. Just play the notes and get your phrasing from the rhythm. The ornaments can come back once the targeting is automatic.
What it looked like after four weeks
Chelsea's own assessment, roughly a week and a half into the chord-tone work: before this, she'd have been the person who sat out entirely. Now she has a tool she can use. Five notes, and a map.
She said she could join the local blues jam she's been looking up and not embarrass herself. That's a modest-sounding sentence, and it's an enormous distance from where she started.
That's first gear. You've got your machete and your map, and you're hacking through the jungle knowing exactly where you're going.
There are more gears. Bigger shapes, arpeggios, major pentatonics, all of it. But every one of them gets dramatically more workable once first gear is solid, and almost impossible before.
Want me to walk you through it?
I'm teaching all of this in a free 90-minute live workshop on Zoom.
Tuesday, September 29th at 10 AM Pacific (1 PM Eastern) Wednesday, September 30th at 5 PM Pacific (8 PM Eastern)
Same material both days, so pick whichever works for you. Save your seat here.
Questions about any of this? Leave a comment on the video or email us at support@guitarfam.com.
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