The One Lick That Finally Fixed the 4 Chord for Me
If playing over blues chord changes is still a bit of a mystery, I want to give you one lick that gets you through the entire 12-bar blues progression.
I call it the nasty lick. And the reason I like it so much is that it solved the specific problem that had me stuck for years.
The problem is almost always the 4 chord
Here's the situation most players know by heart.
You're soloing over a 12-bar blues. Over the 1 chord, things feel fine. You know your minor pentatonic, the notes sit well, nothing sounds wrong. Then bar five arrives, the 4 chord comes in underneath you, and suddenly what you're playing doesn't fit anymore. You can hear that something changed. You just don't have anything to do about it.
So you keep playing the same notes and hope it goes by quickly.
That was me for a long time.
What the lick actually is
The nasty lick is the lowered third of whatever chord you're playing over bent up a bit, to the root of that same chord.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
It works because it outlines the chord. You're playing the notes that tell your ear which chord is happening. Put a little vibrato on the root as you come down onto it and it gets nastier still.
What you need before it'll work
Two things, and neither one is optional.
You have to know the 12-bar blues progression well. Not approximately. You need to feel the change coming before it lands, because the lick is useless if you react late.
You need the shape under your fingers. We're using the small minor pentatonic fragment as our framework, in the key of A, with the root on the 7th fret of the D string. Inside that fragment you've got the lowered seventh, the root, the lowered third, the fourth, and the fifth.
The notes you really care about are the root of the 1 chord, the fourth (which is the root of the 4 chord), and the fifth (the root of the 5 chord). Know exactly where those three live.
Moving it around the progression
Over the 1 chord: lowered third, bend it, land on the root. That's your geometric shape, and it's the one you'll come back to every time the 1 shows up.
Over the 4 chord: the lick is identical in concept, but the shape looks different. Because of the way the guitar is tuned, the minor third no longer sits where it did. You move it up one fret on top. Nothing to figure out or justify, that's just what the guitar tuning does to you. Same lick, slightly different geometry.
Over the 5 chord: you're on the G and B strings here too, so the root and lowered third look the same. Bend the lowered third up a little and come down on the root of the 5.
It's going to sound academic at first
When you first run this over every chord in order, it sounds dry. Mechanical. Like an exercise rather than music, because that's exactly what it is at this stage.
Don't let that put you off, and don't skip it.
What you're actually doing is training your ear to be pulled toward those notes any time you want to emphasize the chord going by. That takes repetition, and the repetition sounds like an exercise while it's happening.
The other half of the method is where it turns into music. Play whatever you want out of the minor pentatonic, whatever sounds good to you, and throw the lick in every now and then when you feel like it. That's the real version. The drilling is just how you get there.
Why this fixes the 4 chord specifically
Here's my favorite part, and the reason I still teach this lick fifteen years on.
The lowered third of the 4 chord is not in the minor pentatonic scale.
So when you play it, you're reaching for something the scale doesn't hand you. And that's precisely why it works. It draws the sound of the 4 chord right out into the open in a way that nothing inside the scale can. The chord that used to be the problem becomes the most interesting moment in your solo.
That single note solved the 4 chord for me.
Where to take it from here
Once this feels natural, you can start stacking other ideas on top of the same framework. Arpeggios and triads over each chord will take you further from the traditional blues sound, but they're excellent for navigating changes, and they build on exactly the same understanding of where you are in the progression.
Start with the lick, though. Get it into your ear first.
If you want to keep going with this, the Blues Jam Jumpstart is our free mini course covering the three most important things you need to start using this little fragment to play real blues solos.
Questions about any of it? Leave a comment on the video or email us at support@guitarfam.com. We'd love to hear from you.
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