Groove is harder to pin down in text and diagrams than chords and scales, so it doesn’t get as much written about it. That gives some folks the mistaken idea that rhythm isn’t as important as melody and harmony. The reverse is true. You can have a long, rich and satisfying guitar-playing life using nothing but the standard fifteen chords, as long as you can groove. If you can’t groove, you can learn all the chords and scales you want, but you won’t sound good.

Here’s an exercise that worked great for me when I was learning, and that I make all my students do. I call it the One Note Groove. It’s pretty simple, you just put on a repetitive beat and play one note over it. Since you don’t have to think about which notes to play, you’re free to devote your entire attention to your timekeeping, your attack, your whole sound — in other words, your groove.

Get some beats lined up

The ideal scenario for practicing groove is to have an excellent drummer or bassist handy. This isn’t too practical for most beginners, who tend to attract other beginners as jam partners. I’m all in favor of hacking it out with other newbies, but you want to develop good timekeeping habits too. Technology is the best solution for most of us.

I dislike metronomes intensely. They’re too cold and artificial, and they can be a disincentive to practicing. The only good thing about metronomes is that they prepare you to play to a click in studio situations. But then, I don’t like using click tracks while recording either. Both for practicing and recording, I prefer drum or percussion loops. They do the same job of keeping your time steady, but they also impart a feeling of groove and energy, and they result in something that sounds a lot more like music.

So where do you get good loops?

I programmed these, feel free to download and use them:

Swung/Shuffle 8th notes 90 bpm by ethanhein

Straight 8th notes 90 bpm by ethanhein

Programs like Garageband and Fruityloops come loaded with plenty of good loops. Using Ableton Live or similar software, it’s easy to make loops out of any song in your record collection. With a drum machine or any of the aforementioned programs, you can program your own loops. Learning how to program drums is a great way to get inside of the beat — it did wonders for my timekeeping.

I also recommend getting a bunch of hip-hop instrumentals. The internet is full of them. I’m particularly fond of the instrumentals from Ready To Die by Notorious B.I.G., which you can download here.

I don’t recommend doing the one-note groove over complete songs. You don’t want chord or key changes, lyrics, sections or any other musical information to distract you from the groove. The less “interesting” your loops or instrumental tracks are, the better.

Which single note do you play?

If you’re using a loop with pitched instruments in it, you’re going to have to figure out what key it’s in so your one note can be the root (or fifth, or some other note that fits well.) And how, you may ask, do you find out what the key is? Trial and error works fine. There are only twelve possible notes, and you can just systematically work your way up the low E string until you find one that sounds good. In fact, this exercise is tremendously valuable ear training in its own right.

If you’re playing to drums or percussion, you can play whatever note you want. After you get deep enough into loop playing, you might notice that even drum loops usually have a characteristic pitch to them, especially in the kick and snare drum. Try to find a note that blends well with the percussion tuning.

Getting the most from your one-note groove

Put your loop or instrumental on infinite repeat, and start playing your note. Find a simple pattern, nothing challenging. Focus on getting it in the pocket. Make it really sound smooth. Don’t push, just relax into it. See how long you can keep it steady.

Once you’ve really nailed your pattern down, try adding or removing a note, and see how long you can keep that going. Shift the pattern a beat earlier or a beat later. Try finding a pattern with an odd length and let it cycle in and out of sync with the beat.

Try to play only the downbeats. Then try playing any beat but the downbeat. Play long sustained notes and pay attention to the way they decay. Play short, staccato notes and see how percussive you can sound. Play louder and softer.

Focus on the drums. Try playing the same pattern as the kick drum, as the snare, as the hi-hats. You can learn a lot about rhythm by focusing on specific drum instruments.

If you’re struggling to keep up, slow the tempo down until it’s comfortable. In general, you should play as slow as you can stand. Focus on sounding better, not playing faster.

Make sure you aren’t rushing ahead of the beat — beginners always rush like crazy as soon as they start getting a little mastery. Try leaving a lot of space between your notes and hear how your silences interact with the groove. If your loop swings, make sure to match its feel.

The one-note groove is a highly meditative exercise. For the first few minutes, you might struggle a little to settle into your groove. Then you probably get bored. But if you keep going through the boredom, you can suddenly break free into previously unexplored regions of musical inspiration. The longer you stay focused on your groove, the more pleasurable it gets. Listen to Fela Kuti or John Coltrane stretch out on single-chord grooves for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, and try to emulate their relaxed intensity.

Example: the Funky Drummer Bonus Beat Reprise

One of the best tracks you can use to do the one-chord groove exercise over is the this remix of “The Funky Drummer Parts One and Two” by James Brown.

Play on the open A string. Use your left hand and the heel of your right hand to mute the string to control your notes’ duration. Get ready to feel the funk!

Repetition is a great teacher, not just of music, but of everything. Let the loop ride and see where it takes you.

To understand tuning, it helps to start with the concept of the octave. Two pitches are an octave apart if their frequencies have the ratio 2:1. Standard concert A has a frequency of 440 Hz. When you play concert A on the guitar, the string vibrates to and fro 440 times every second. If you double the frequency to 880 Hz, you get an A that’s one octave higher. If you halve the frequency to 220 Hz, you get an A that’s an octave lower. The ear hears all these different pitches as being the “same” note. (Technically, they’re the same pitch class.) This ability we have to hear frequencies related by powers of two as being the “same” is known in music theory terms as octave equivalency. This ability isn’t specific to humans. Rhesus monkeys hear octaves as being equivalent too.

Octaves emerge naturally out of the overtone series. The first harmonic of a vibrating string is an octave above the fundamental. The third harmonic is two octaves above. The seventh harmonic is three octaves above, and the fifteenth harmonic is four octaves above.

After the octave, the next musical interval you get from the natural overtone series is the fifth (it’s the third harmonic.) Two pitches are a fifth apart if the ratio between their frequencies is 3:2. The note a fifth above concert A (440 Hz) is E (660 Hz.)

Fifths are a very significant interval in western music theory. If you keep going up by fifths, you visit every note in the chromatic scale (every key on the piano) until you eventually wind up back on the note where you began. So if you start on A, then go up to E, then B, then F#, and so on, eventually you’ll wind up on the A seven octaves higher from where you started. This concept is known as the circle of fifths, though it would be more accurate to call it the spiral of fifths, since you’re getting higher and higher in pitch.

The circle of fifths is foundational to western music theory. It makes it possible to transpose music effortlessly from one key to another. The circle gives rise to all sorts of useful and interesting symmetries, too, like its close relationship to the circle of semitones.

But there’s a big problem with the circle of fifths. If you use the 3/2 ratio you get from the natural overtone series, the circle doesn’t actually close. Recall that to go up by a fifth, you multiply the frequency by 3/2. To keep going up by fifths, you keep multiplying by 3/2. To go all the way around the circle of fifths from A to A, you multiply by 3/2 twelve times:

(3/2)^12 = 129.746337890625

Going around the circle of fifths twelve times is the same as going up seven octaves. To go up an octave, you multiply by two, so to go up seven octaves, you multiply by two seven times:

 2^7 = 128

Going from A to A by fifths means multiplying the frequency by 129.746337890625, but going by octaves means multiplying by 128. The discrepancy between the two multiples is known in music theory terms as the Pythagorean comma, and it has caused musicians a lot of gray hair over the past few hundred years. It would be nice if a tuning system based on fifths agreed with a system based on octaves. It would make it a lot easier to hop from one key to another without having to retune your instruments. But that is sadly not possible.

The history of western tuning systems is the story of musicians trying to resolve the contradiction between the desire to have pure-sounding overtone-based intervals and a closed circle of fifths. European musicians of the 1700s tried all kinds of compromises. You could have some of the keys sound perfectly in tune, and have others be out of tune. You could have eleven decent-sounding keys and one awful one. You could use perfect fifths and smooth out the Pythagorean comma with out-of-tune thirds. You could have pianos with many extra keys for all the subtly different versions of each note.

I don’t advise getting too bogged down in the minutiae of all these different systems. The bottom line is that the western world eventually settled on its present consensus solution, which is to just make all the intervals other than octaves a little bit wrong. This system is called equal temperament. It’s considered a “modern” idea, but it dates back at least as far as Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei.

In equal temperament, all intervals are built by adding semitones together, and all semitones are defined as a ratio of one to the twelfth root of two. Twelve half steps gets you the perfect octave, because multiplying by the twelfth root of two twelve times equals two. An equal-tempered fifth is seven semitones –  you multiply the frequency by 2^(7/12). This comes to about 1.4983, which isn’t quite the 3/2 from the overtone system that your ear would like, but it’s close enough to not be offensively awful-sounding. The other equal-tempered intervals are similarly “wrong,” but by similarly bearable small amounts. Every key is identical and the circle of fifths closes, so everybody is more or less happy. If you get an electronic guitar tuner, it’ll be based on equal temperament.

Some musicians lament the loss of pure fifths. One bassist I know claims that all those out-of-tune fifths are gradually making western listeners crazy, which is why we’ve had so many enormous and horrible wars in the past couple of centuries. This idea sounds silly to me, but it’s true that pure fifths are easier on the brain. On instruments where the tuning is flexible, like winds and violin, the most skilled musicians tend to seek out pure intervals by ear, adjusting their intonation slightly depending on the key. Good singers do this too. Electronic instruments are a lot easier to retune than acoustic ones, and it’s sometimes possible to program in whatever tuning system suits you. Auto-tune lets you choose any historical or microtonal tuning system you want right off a menu.

So what if you’re just trying to get your guitar in tune? You need to make peace with not being able to do it perfectly. Use an electronic tuner to get the individual strings to their correct equal-tempered pitches and deal with the fifths sounding a little wrong, or tune with harmonics and have the low register not quite match the high register. In practice, most guitarists just fudge a little bit one way or the other, and guitars rarely stay tuned the way you want them to anyway. As always, let your ear be your guide.

Here’s how to program the scale into Auto-tune. And here’s a new composition of mine using two melodic minor scales, C and G.

Melodic Minor

mp3 download

Melodic minor looks innocent enough on paper. It’s just the major scale with a flat third. Here’s the A melodic minor scale:

A  B  C  D  E  F# G#

The chords and scales you get from melodic minor are exceptionally dark and peculiar. The tonic chord is Am(maj7), sometimes called the major-minor chord:

A  C  E  G#

You can hear this chord in the first four bars 0f “Chelsea Bridge” by Billy Strayhorn:

The weirdness of melodic minor comes from the way it lives simultaneously in the minor and major key worlds. There’s a constant conflict between the bottom half of the scale and the top.

A B C D E -- sounds minor

E F# G# A -- sounds major

Melodic minor also has more internal dissonance than the major scale and its modes. Major scale has a tritone between its fourth and seventh notes. Melodic minor has two tritones, between the third and sixth, and between the fourth and seventh. In A melodic minor, the tritones are between C and F#, and between D and G#.

Playing melodic minor on guitar

Unfortunately, melodic minor is extremely annoying to play on guitar. All of the fingerings require pinkie stretches and/or position shifts. The only way to make it easier is to not use all six strings. Here’s the most accessible fingering for A melodic minor I can think of.

A quick Google search will reveal many more fingerings. All of them are hard. But hey, grappling with them will really help you learn the fretboard.

Melodic minor modes

Just like the major scale, melodic minor has modes, new scales you get by starting and ending on notes other than the root. All of these scales are just as weird as their parent, with daunting technical names to match. Two of these scales in particular are invaluable for jazz and other harmonically adventurous music.

Lydian dominant

The fourth mode of melodic minor is like lydian with a flat (dominant) seventh. Alternatively, you can think of it as being like mixolydian with a raised fourth.

D  E  F# G# A  B  C

This scale sounds awesome on dominant 7th chords. It also has a special relationship to fundamental physics. Lydian dominant is sometimes called the acoustic scale because its constituent pitches are close to the ones arising from the natural overtone series.

Eastern European folk music uses a lot of lydian dominant. Modern jazz and the artsier forms of rock and metal are fond of it too. Björk uses it on her terrifying song “Pluto.”

Altered scale

The other crucial melodic minor mode is the seventh one. I learned it as the altered scale, and I’ve also seen it less helpfully called the super locrian or diminished whole-tone scale. Altered scale is a crucial part of the vocabulary of jazz from the fifties onwards, especially for the more intellectual players like John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock. Here’s the G# altered scale, the seventh mode of A melodic minor:

G# A  B  C  D  E  F#

Altered scale is a tough one to remember. A good mnemonic is to take the major scale and raise the root a half step. To get G# altered, just take the G major scale and raise the root to G#.

The chord that you get from the G# altered scale is G#7 with a flat fifth (D), sharp fifth (E), flat ninth (A) and sharp ninth (B.) The full chord symbol would be:

G#7(b5 #5 b9 #9)

That’s a godawful thing to see on a score. Because the chord is G#7 with all the possible alterations to its fifth and ninth, it’s easier to just write:

G#7alt

So say you’re in C# or C# minor and you hit the V chord, G#7. The conventional scale to play would be G# mixolydian for a major feel, and C# harmonic minor for a minor feel. Coltrane might use one of those, but he’d be just as likely to play G# altered, for either major or minor.

Gil Evans makes heavy use of altered scale in the arrangement of Porgy And Bess he did with Miles Davis. Listen at 0:19.

It’s not on YouTube, but be sure to also check out the track “Gone,” which is based around this same altered scale lick, but with an uptempo feel and awesome drumming by Philly Joe Jones. The lick also appears in “There’s A Boat That’s Leaving Soon For New York.” Really the whole Porgy and Bess album is worth a spin.

Tritone substitution and melodic minor modes

In jazz you frequently encounter the ii-V-I chord progression. Here it is in the key of C:

Dm7  G7  Cmaj7

This is a nice sound, but it’s bland. Starting in the bebop era, jazz musicians adopted the practice of replacing V chords with the dominant chord whose root is a tritone away. So in the progression above, you’d replace G7 with Db7. This makes the bassline satisfyingly chromatic:

Dm7  Db7 Cmaj7

The tritone substitution isn’t as music-theoretically crazy as it sounds. The active ingredient in G7 is the tritone between the third B and the seventh F. The active ingredient in Db7 is the tritone between the third F and the seventh B. Because they have their defining tritone in common, G7 and Db7 are functionally the “same” chord.

Here’s where the real fun begins. The maximally hip voicing of G7 in this context is G7alt. The scale that goes with G7alt is the G altered scale, the seventh mode of Ab melodic minor:

G  Ab  Bb  B  Db  Eb  F

For the tritone sub, you want to use Db7(#11). The scale that fits this chord is Db lydian dominant, the fourth mode of Ab melodic minor:

Db  Eb  F  G  Ab  Bb  B

G altered and Db lydian dominant are the same scale, just starting on different notes. The same Ab melodic minor scale sounds equally awesome over each chord. Try it!

How to form the scale

Imagine an ice cube tray with twelve slots, one for each note in the western tuning system, labeled like so:

C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B

To make the C major scale, you just remove all the ice cubes with # in their names, like so:

C [ ] D [ ] E F [ ] G [ ] A [ ] B

Here’s a graphic representation of the C major scale. Scale tones are in red, the notes you skip are gray.The scale is extremely easy to play on the piano: just play the white keys from C to C.

Here’s the C major scale in standard music notation. The curvy lines show notes with a skip between them, and the angled ones show notes that are adjacent on the piano:

Here’s how you’d program the C major scale into Auto-tune, which clearly visualizes the notes you leave out:

Where did the naming convention come from?

Given that C major is “home base” in the western tonal system, it’s weird that it starts on C and not A. Why this departure from the alphabet? I have no idea. I put this question up on Quora; maybe someone there will have some insight.

Also, what’s up with all the sharps and flats? Why not just use the first twelve letters of the alphabet for the twelve pitches? Maybe it’s just too many things to remember – we don’t do well trying to hold more than eight or nine distinct pieces of information in short-term memory. The sharps and flats system is annoying but it does reflect the fact that you can form other scales by starting with C major and raising or lowering (sharping or flatting) certain pitches.

Some music theory geekery

You can play the C major scale by going around the circle of fifths from F to B:

F  C  G  D  A  E  B

Try playing the scale this way, it’s fun.

The notes you leave out of the C major scale form the G flat major and E flat minor pentatonic scales. Try playing only on the black keys on the piano to hear these scales.

Harmonizing the scale

When you play certain notes from the major scale simultaneously, you get a lot of interesting chords. The pattern that generates the most commonly used chords in C major is very simple. You can form a C major chord by starting on C and playing every other note in the scale:

C  E  G  B etc...

You can form chords from any note in the scale the same way. Just pick one and go up the scale, skipping every other note. When you do this for all seven notes in C major, you get a group of seven chords that sound really good together.

C:    C  E  G (I)
Dm:   D  F  A (ii)
Em:   E  G  B (iii)
F:    F  A  C (IV)
G:    G  B  D (V)
Am:   A  C  E (vi)
Bdim: B  D  F (vii)

These seven chords are called the diatonic chords to C major. (The name comes from Greek.) The diatonic chords are good to know. You can play them in any order and any combination, and the C major scale sounds terrific over all of them.

The roman numerals next to each chord refer to the scale degree the chord is based on. G is the V chord in C major because G is the fifth note in the C major scale. These numbers can be a good shorthand. You’ll see references to chord progressions like I-IV-V, which means, in C, play C, F, G. Another common progression is I-vi-ii-V — that’s C, Am, Dm, G.

The first note in each chord is called the root. The next one is the third (makes sense, you skipped the second.) After that is the fifth. If you add another note to each one, you get seventh chords.

Cmaj7: C E G B
Dm7:   D F A C
Em7:   E G B D
Fmaj7: F A C E
G7:    G B D F
Am7:   A C E G
Bm7b5: B D F A

Adding still another note to each chord makes more complex-sounding ninth chords. Adding yet another note makes eleventh chords, and yet another makes thirteenth chords. After the thirteenth, you’re back on the root again.

A very common rock and pop songwriting technique is to use all of the diatonic chords except for the I chord. By combining Dm, Em, F, G7 and Am, you can get a dark, moody and ambiguous sound that’s still tied together by the familiar major scale. You get enough angst to have an edge, without scaring away mainstream audiences.

Playing C major on the guitar

Major scales are surprisingly annoying to play on guitar. They’re much harder to play than the pentatonic or blues scales. Here are some good fingerings for C major — click through to see them bigger:

The first row shows the open position, so named because it uses open strings. The second row shows a closed-position fingering that fits conveniently between the seventh and tenth frets. Use your index finger on the seventh fret, your middle on the eighth, your ring on the ninth and your pinkie on the tenth. This is a nice fingering because you can slide it up and down the neck to easily form any other major scale.

The bottom row shows arpeggios of all the chords diatonic to C major. This exercise is a challenge, so take it slowly, and try to get it to sound musical and rhythmic. Play it backwards too. Mastering your arpeggios can inspire tons of melodic ideas, and will make your solos much richer and more structured.

See this web site for more major scale guitar fingerings. There are a lot of them, and they can make you crazy. My advice is to really master the ones above first. Then learning the rest of them will be less daunting.

Modes

Not only does the C major scale contain seven awesome chords, but it also includes six other scales. This is a complex topic that gets a post of its own, but the basic idea is simple. By playing the scale starting and ending on notes other than C, you get an assortment of exciting new sounds.

• If you play C major from D to D, you get a scale called D Dorian. This is a minor scale that goes well with the Dm7 chord. It’s great for funk and sixties jazz.
• If you play C major from G to G, you get a scale called G Mixolydian, which fits well over G7. This is a crucial scale for rock and roll.
• If you play C major from A to A, you get A natural minor. This is the basis of the key of A minor, the relative minor key to C major.

Major scale in action

Most of the European-descended nursery rhymes use the major scale: “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and so on. Tons of pop and folk songs, hymns, theme songs and jingles use it too, everything from “Amazing Grace” to “Good King Wenceslas” to “Imagine.”

In classical music, the major scale is traditionally used for bright, happy moods: think of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or the William Tell Overture. The scale can be tragic or majestic, too, if played slowly enough. My favorite example is Beethoven’s string quartet in A minor, opus 132, 3rd movement. This is one of the most depressing pieces of music I can think of, and it’s all major.

The major scale can be bland and vanilla-sounding, but it’s all in the execution. Björk’s beautiful “Anchor Song” sounds crunchy and dissonant, but it’s entirely in the major scale. She just chooses surprising combinations of notes, arranged in rhythmically surprising ways. (Unfortunately, the sound and image in this video aren’t lined up well.)

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” talks through the diatonic chords in the major scale in its first verse: “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift.” Those major-scale chords might be well-worn cliches, but we’re nowhere near exhausting their possibilities.

When you’re first learning to improvise, it’s daunting to be confronted with all the scales. Fortunately, there’s one scale that sounds good in any situation: the blues scale. It’s a universal harmonic solvent. I haven’t encountered a chord progression yet that didn’t fit with the blues scale. It works in blues, of course, but it also sounds terrific in rock, country, jazz, reggae, funk and much else.

How to play the blues scale

The blues scale is the minor pentatonic with a note added, the sharp fourth/flat fifth. The C blues scale is C, Eb, F, F#, G, Bb. Here it is in standard music notation:

And here’s how you program it into Auto-tune.

The blues scale is easy to play on guitar. Your index finger plays the root on the E string, so to play C blues, put your index on the eighth fret.

The Eb blues scale is exceptionally easy to play on piano — just play the black keys and add the note A.

The blues scale and music theory

In western music theory terms, the blues scale is practically inexplicable. The Eb in the C blues scale makes it sound minor, but the scale is customarily played on top of major chords. And no traditional western scale has three adjacent chromatic notes, the blues scale’s F, F# and G.

The F# is especially odd, since it’s a tritone away from the root C. But western music theory can’t explain everything that people like. From a science perspective, the F# is perfectly reasonable, since it emerges naturally from the overtone series of C. And science aside, there’s something about the blues scale’s asymmetrical sequence of big and small leaps that appeals to the intuition. I can’t articulate any particular reason why. Your thoughts on this are welcome.

As I said above, blues scale works in just about any improvisational situation. This makes it especially useful when you’re learning to play jazz. Until you’ve attained a significant level of mastery, it’s hard enough to follow a tune’s chord changes, much less express yourself while doing so. Even the best jazz soloists sometimes get lost in the changes. The blues scale is a reliable fallback position. Other musicians might judge you for not being able to make the changes, but the audience is always glad to hear blues, so I say, let the haters hate.

The blues scale is a fertile source of harmonic ideas for songwriting and arranging. Use the scale tones as roots for chords and get ready for pleasure. Dominant seventh chords work great: C7, Eb7, F7, F#7, G7, Bb7. The F# also suggests F# diminished, a jazz standby.

Blues scale melodies

As a kid, my most memorable exposure to the blues scale was Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme.” Mancini also uses chromatic approach notes above and below the scale tones, very hip.

Charles Mingus uses the blues scale as the upper extensions for a set of abstract chords in “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” This might be one of the most beautiful blues melodies in history.

“Take Five” by Dave Brubeck uses blues scale for its A section.

Other blues scales

You can combine the blues scale with other scales for a richer assortment of tones. Combining the blues scale with the major scale gives you the entire chromatic scale except for flat two and flat six. You can throw those two notes in as passing tones too, so you can effectively play any note you want over blues. That’s a lot of possibility!

Diminished chords sound great over blues. C diminished seventh is C, Eb, Gb, A. The combination of the major sixth A with the flat third Eb is especially tasty, since there’s a tritone between them. Check out the turnaround at the end of Miles Davis’ trumpet solo in “All Of You” on Round About Midnight for a great diminished chord blues lick. Listen at 1:40.

Blue notes

Blues wouldn’t be blues without blue notes. Blue notes are microtones in between blues scale notes and major scale notes. The pitches in between Eb and E, or between F# and G, are good examples. Here’s a more complete discussion of blue notes.

Blues is a confusing term. You probably have some idea of what blues is, but it’s surprisingly hard to define it specifically. There are many songs with the word “blues” in the title that aren’t technically blues at all, like “Lovesick Blues” by Hank Williams. John Lee Hooker was the living embodiment of blues, but a lot of his best-known songs aren’t technically blues either.

Meanwhile, there are quite a few songs using the blues form that you might not think to identify as blues. Two examples: “Shuckin’ The Corn” by Flatt and Scruggs, and the theme from the sixties Batman TV show.

So what exactly is blues?

Blues is a mood

The term descends from the “blue devils,” slang for depression. Blues music is a soulful, wailing expression of pain, heartbreak and yearning. But not all blues is depressing, and not all depressing music is blues. There’s a whole category of bragging, sexually dominant blues by artists like Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith, the precursors to swaggering hip-hop MCs. Meanwhile, punk-influenced bands like Nirvana and Radiohead make music that’s full of anguish, but you wouldn’t call their material blues. To me, blues is more about persevering through the pain than the pain itself. It’s an expression of adult regrets and sorrows, as opposed to rock’s more adolescent angst.

It’s possible to invest just about any style of music with blues feeling. In rock, jazz, country or pop, you can get blues feel by playing slower, swinging more, using more expression and idiosyncrasy, playing repetitive and riff-based ideas, and being as emotionally direct as possible. You can also slip in the blues scale; more on that below. I’ve noticed that most of the singers I like infuse everything they do with blues feeling, from Aretha Franklin to Gregg Allman to Michael Jackson.

Aside from the general emotion, the word blues refers to three specific technical music concepts: a scale, a set of pitches, and a song form.

The blues scale

To make the blues scale, start with a minor pentatonic scale and add the sharp fourth/flat fifth.

The blues scale descends from west African music brought to America by slaves. It sounds equally good over major and minor chords, and it flouts European conventions of consonance and dissonance. See a full blog post about the blues scale.

Blue notes

A lot of people incorrectly describe the flat third and seventh of the blues scale as “blue notes.” Blue notes are microtonal pitches that lie between the piano keys. See a full blog post about blue notes.

The blues song form

When musicians say “This song is a blues in C,” they mean that the song has a twelve-bar form using a particular combination of C7, F7 and G7 chords. All those 7th chords have unresolved tritones in them, a crucial ingredient in the blues feel. Here’s the simplest version of twelve-bar blues in C.

| C7 | C7 | C7 | C7 |
| F7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |
| G7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |

Here’s a more common version, with a little more complexity.

| C7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |
| F7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |
| G7 | F7 | C7 | G7 |

There are uncountable thousands of songs written in the twelve-bar blues form. One of my favorites is Muddy Waters’ “Standing Around Crying” — the devastating harmonica is by Little Walter Jacobs.

There are endless refinements and embellishments you can tack onto this basic structure. Jazz musicians will usually play something more like this:

| Cmaj7 | F7     | Cmaj7 | G-7 C7 |
| F7    | F#dim7 | C7    | A7     |
| D-7   | G7     | C7 A7 | D-7 G7 |

Again, to pick one example out of uncountably many, here’s “Parker’s Mood” by Charlie Parker.

“Parker’s Mood” and “Standing Around Crying” hint at the staggering breadth of expression you can get out of the twelve-bar-blues form. Some musicians return to the form again and again and never exhaust the possibilities. Duke Ellington alone probably wrote hundreds of twelve-bar blues tunes.

The blues form is basic knowledge for American musicians, which makes it a reliable standby, especially for informal or ad hoc groups. I did a show at St Nick’s Pub a few years ago with a jazz and R&B singer named Nicole Bishop. Most of her band members were meeting for the first time on stage that night. (In the jazz world this isn’t as unusual a situation as you might think.) The weather was bad, and Nicole was very late to the gig. To stall for time, the band played blues in various keys at various tempos, including “Twisted” by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and “Blue Monk” by Thelonious Monk. We were able to keep the audience from getting impatient and leaving until Nicole arrived.

There are some other widely-used blues forms other than the standard twelve-bar. Eight bar blues is the first two thirds of twelve-bar blues, as in “Bemsha Swing” by Monk. There’s also sixteen bar blues, which usually repeats bars nine and ten of the twelve-bar variety, as in “Watermelon Man” by Herbie Hancock.

Minor blues

It’s possible to play twelve-bar blues in minor keys too. Here’s a typical form.

| C-7 | C-7 | C-7 | C-7 |
| F-7 | F-7 | C-7 | C-7 |
| Ab7 | G7  | C-7 | C-7 |

“The Thrill Is Gone” by BB King is probably the best-known minor blues tune. John Coltrane loved the minor blues, and used it for some of his best compositions. My favorite is “Equinox,” which features what might well be the man’s most beautiful solo.

Lewis Porter has a full transcription of “Equinox” in his book John Coltrane: His Life And Music, an absolute must-read for jazz nerds.

Simpler blues forms

The simplest form of blues doesn’t have a formal name. I call it the “one chord blues,” an open-ended groove on a single chord, ambiguously major and/or minor. John Lee Hooker got a lot of mileage out of this form.

Coltrane played a lot of one-chord blues too, though with a very different stylistic vocabulary. Coltrane’s one-chord blues is about as intense as music gets.

Blues modules for guitar

Blues is exceptionally well suited to the guitar, since a lot of the tastiest riffs fall easily under the fingers. Here’s a standard boogie-woogie groove for blues in A. It’s a good exercise for a beginner who’s mastered the standard fifteen chords and wants to take the next step. Use your index on the second fret, your ring on the fourth fret and your pinkie on the fifth fret.

The racial politics of blues

The history of American music is largely the story of white people appropriating traditionally black forms. That’s never more true than the story of the blues. White musicians enriched rock and roll immeasurably by injecting it with big doses of blues, and some of them enriched themselves financially that way too. Some white blues appropriators have made a good-faith effort to show proper love and appreciation. Others, not so much. The Onion says it best: “Affluent White Man Enjoys, Causes The Blues.”

Blues and originality

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I take issue with the concept of originality in music. I don’t think that originality is desirable, or even possible. Long before I got involved in sample culture, I confronted the issue of originality and ownership in the context of blues. Take the guitar riff I wrote out above. Who owns that? Who originated it? If I use it in a song, am I being original?

Blues is defined by a set of distinctive cliches, interchangeable modules. Different people will combine those modules together in different ways, but everyone from Charlie Patton to Charlie Parker is drawing from the same box of legos. What’s the difference between creating an “original” blues tune and just stringing standard riffs together? If you want your blues to be recognizable as such, you have to stick close to tradition. For traditional players in the days before recordings and widespread copyrighting, there was hardly any distinction between quotation and composition. See an eloquent expression of this idea by Peter Friedman.

The key to blues playing is to not to even try to be original. Inhabit the cliches, play them in your distinctive voice, and enjoy the connection to all the other musicians who have used those same cliches. Feel the pleasure of your ego dissolving in the face of a huge and beautiful tradition, belonging to everyone and no one.

It’s on my mind because Dangerous Minds posted the isolated tracks, and they’re a lot of fun. It’s fascinating to hear the separated vocals, guitars, bass and drums. The Youtube videos containing the tracks were swiftly taken down by the Stones’ lawyers, of course, but as of this writing you can still download the stems in multitrack Ogg format. You can open and edit the Oggs in Audacity, and export pieces in other formats.

Whenever a guy like me hears “isolated tracks” I know it’s remix time. So here are some samples from “Gimme Shelter” along with various other sounds, enjoy.

Rock With Shelter

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson

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Shelter Guitar

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson vs Glen Velez vs Britney Spears vs Charles Mingus

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There’s such a business opportunity with these kinds of isolated tracks. I haven’t bought too many recordings lately, but I’d happily plunk down money for easily-remixable stems, especially if they came pre-sliced in Recycle format. I doubt the Stones would be interested in selling such a thing, since they have plenty of money already, but I could see this being a great revenue stream for younger, hungrier bands. A big part of the reason people like music-based video games is that they get you inside familiar songs in a new way — you’re focused on the guitar or bass in a way that casual listeners rarely do. I could see the Guitar Hero generation eagerly embracing a simplified version of Ableton Live or Reason.

Anyway, “Gimme Shelter.” The female vocalist on the track is Merry Clayton, and she kills it. Aside from this song, she’s had a colorful career. She’s sung on various movie soundtracks, and did backing vocals on songs as diverse as “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos. During her solo verse on “Gimme Shelter,” her voice cracks on the word “shot” from the last line, and then again on the word “murder.” That’s the kind of total emotional commitment that grabs the listener hard. On the isolated vocal you can clearly hear Mick give an appreciative “Yeah!”

The isolated tracks highlight how sloppy the Stones were even at their absolute best. The Dangerous Minds post describes Charlie Watts as sounding like “a human metronome here.” This is completely wrong. I put those drums on the grid and can assure you that Charlie Watts’ time is all over the place. So are the rest of the Stones. That’s the point. Sloppy chic runs directly counter to the musical sensibilities of the digital audio era. I sincerely doubt that any producer would permit such raggedy playing onto a commercial release in this day and age.

I’m no big lover of willful sloppiness. The Stones’ superficial casualness on their best stuff is underpinned by a very disciplined sense of groove and restraint. Later in their career, they got genuinely careless, and that’s when they started sucking. It’s a fine line between insouciant confidence and plain indifference. On “Gimme Shelter” the Stones walk that line perfectly.

Mick Jagger is amusing and everything, but Keith Richards is the Stones’ main point of musical interest for me. He plays simple, well-worn cliches, but he has a totally distinctive touch and approach that keeps his licks fresh all these decades later. Keef gets some of his signature sound from an unusual guitar tuning. He tunes to open G, which is common enough for slide players, but then he takes the low E string off, so he’s left with D G D B D. (On “Gimme Shelter” he has a capo on the second fret.) If you’re a guitarist, try it sometime, it’s fun. Here’s a detailed guide to Keef-style guitar.

Keef supports my assertion that songwriting is not about having original ideas; it’s about recombining existing ideas. When asked about his songwriting by Guitar World, here’s what he said:

Personally, I don’t consider that you create or write anything. The best way to think about it, for me anyway, is that you’re an antenna. I sit down at an instrument-guitar, piano, bass or whatever-and play somebody else’s songs. And usually within 20 minutes, more or less, suddenly something’s coming. And that’s when the antenna goes up. [He wets his finger and raises it in the air.] Incoming! So you get this sort of gift. You work it up a bit and then transmit it. The idea that “I wrote that,” or “I created that” is an overblown artistic sort of thing that people love to put on writing songs. It can screw you up. If you think that it’s all down to you, you’ve got another thing coming.

Words to live by. Too bad the Stones lawyers are so sampling-unfriendly. If Keef was a young up-and-comer right now I bet he would skip the imitation of his blues heroes and just sample them directly.

The diagram above shows the F# minor pentatonic scale. Your index finger is on F# on both E strings. To play any of the other minor pentatonic scales, you just slide the box up or down the fretboard, planting your index on the appropriate E string note. To play G minor pentatonic, put your index on the third fret. To play A minor, put it on the fifth fret.

Major and minor pentatonics

By learning the minor pentatonic box, you get another scale for free: the major pentatonic. Play A minor pentatonic, by putting your index finger on the fifth fret. With the bass note A, this will sound like the key of A minor. No big surprise there. But now play the same scale over the bass note C. All of a sudden, you’re in the key of C major. This is because the A minor pentatonic scale (A, C, D, E, G) contains the same notes as the C major pentatonic scale (C, D, E, G, A.) This hints at the deeper underlying relationship between C major and A minor.

So here’s the rule:

• For the minor pentatonic, put your index on the desired root on the E string.
• For the major pentatonic, put your pinkie on the desired root on the E string.

Let’s say you’re playing in C. For the minor pentatonic, you put your index on the eighth fret. For the major pentatonic, put your pinkie on the eighth fret, so your index is on the fifth fret. Which one should you use? Try them both and use your ears.

Here’s a comparison of the C minor and C major pentatonic scales, as you’d program them into Auto-tune. Minor is above, major is below. Click through to see them in music notation, hear them and get more background.

Real-life examples: “Summertime” by the Gershwins is almost entirely comprised of the minor pentatonic. “Oh Susannah” uses the major pentatonic for the first two lines.

A little music theory

The word pentatonic comes from Greek, meaning “five tones” — the pentatonic scales have five notes in them. Traditional western scales have seven notes in them.

The major pentatonic scale is the same as the major scale minus the fourth and seventh notes. So you can get C major pentatonic by starting with the C major scale — C, D, E, F, G, A, B — and removing F and B. If you write the major scale on the circle of fifths, the notes in the pentatonic are conveniently grouped together. They’re the red ones:

F and B make up a tritone, and they give the C major scale its tension and dissonance. Removing the tritone means there are no wrong notes in C major pentatonic. Everything you play will sound good. That’s nice for beginners. But it also means there’s no risk, and therefore not as much drama.

To get C minor pentatonic, start with C natural minor — C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab, Bb — and remove the second and sixth notes, D and Ab. Again, you’re removing the tritone, making the remaining notes safe but reducing the potential for drama.

You can add one note to the minor pentatonic to get the wonderfully versatile blues scale.

The piano connection

The E flat minor/G flat major pentatonic scale is a special case on the piano, because it coincides with the black keys. To sound like a piano genius, just play the black keys over E flat or G flat.

The piano helps you visualize an interesting fact from music theory — if you take the twelve possible pitches in Western tuning and subtract the G flat major pentatonic scale, you’re left with the C major scale, the white keys on the piano. Any major scale can be built by subtracting the major pentatonic whose root is a tritone away. Hmmmm.

Some advanced pentatonic wizardry

The bad news when you’re learning guitar is that there are a zillion scales. The good news is that there’s a lot of overlap between them. By shifting your regular old pentatonic box around the fretboard, you have access to a wide variety of lively and exotic new sounds.

Here’s what happens when you play all twelve possible minor pentatonic scales over an A root. There’s no need to memorize this list. The practical takeaway is that you should try the different pentatonics against different bass notes.

A minor pentatonic: A blues, natural minor, dorian and phrygian.

Bb minor pentatonic: Nothing useful.

B minor pentatonic: A sus, major or 7th. Also A dorian.

C minor pentatonic: A7 altered. Resolve to D or D minor afterwards.

C# minor pentatonic: A major seventh. Lovely.

D minor pentatonic: A natural minor or phrygian.

Eb minor pentatonic: Nothing useful.

E minor pentatonic: A7sus, from mixolydian. Also natural minor.

F minor pentatonic: Nothing useful.

F# minor pentatonic: A major pentatonic.

G minor pentatonic: A phrygian. Flamenco time!

Ab minor pentatonic: A lydian. Awesome.

If you don’t have a bassist handy, you can experiment by playing the pentatonics on the D, G, B and high E strings, while letting the open A string ring underneath.

When I was learning my scales, it was super useful to know that if I shifted the pentatonic box down one fret from the key, I got this weird and beautiful lydian sound. It was only later that I parsed out the music theoretical meaning. As always, use your ears and have fun.

Miles and Eno seem radical, but in a way, they’re just boiling the usual compositional process down to its raw essentials. Really, all composition and songwriting consist of improvising within constraints and then sequencing the best ideas into shape. Usually this improvisation happens in short spurts, inside the composer’s head or alone at an instrument. Using a recording device instead of a sheet of paper can make the process more bodily and immediate, and can help get at playful ideas that might not squeak past the mind’s internal judges and editors during the relatively slow process of writing stuff on paper. Michael Jackson wrote his best stuff by improvising into a tape recorder. There’s something about improvising a performance while being recorded that focuses the mind wonderfully.

Since 2004 I’ve been writing and recording with Barbara Singer in different configurations. The first version was her idea, a band called Blopop. She had some techno versions of pop songs programmed into her MC-909 groovebox, and the idea was that she’d sing and DJ, and I’d improvise guitar on top.

Both Barbara and I come from jazz training, and both of us felt boxed in playing standards. Free jazz wasn’t that interesting to us either; it felt too chaotic and self-indulgent, too disconnected from the musical world we live in. Babsy had the bright idea to use electronic beats and loops as the basis for improvising. Her original concept was to use pop songs as the basis for improv. We did a little performing that way, but then quickly moved into completely open-ended blowing over beats.

Brian Eno has all kinds of different systems for imposing order on his in-studio improvising. For us the system was to use the presets in Barbara’s groovebox. The generic techno grooves programmed into the box establish  a key and a vibe, so you just set the tempo and you’re off to the races. In a perfect world we would have programmed everything ourselves from scratch, but there was something wonderfully effortless and expedient about just dialing through the presets at random.

Babsy is an improv comedian, a veteran of various improv groups and a student of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. We talked a lot about the improv comedy bible Truth In Comedy and how applicable it is to music too. If you’re confident, responsive to the other performers, and genuinely focused on the present moment, you really can’t do anything wrong.

Constrained improvisation is a perfect meditation exercise. I learned firsthand what the Buddhists always say, that it takes a lot of practice and discipline to be maximally effortless and intuitive. I’ve enjoyed few activities more than freeform musical improv over techno beats. Completely free improv can be a pleasure too, but it can also be a pain, since it usually devolves into formless noodling. The beats give enough structure to make the process fun. Here are some of our attempts to put the Truth In Comedy principle into action.

See

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Improvisation recorded during the first time Barbara and I were ever in a room together, in the summer of 2004. Babsy is in the excellent habit of recording pretty much every note she plays or sings. I was a little taken aback when she wanted to record our first session, but went along. This isn’t edited, or even mixed. I pick a starting note at random, which turns out to be the flat seventh of the synth loop’s key. That establishes the main riff I have to work off of. This element of harmonic randomness ended up being a big part of the band’s pleasure for me, having to puzzle out a good-sounding relationship between the note I picked to start on with whatever came out of the groove box.

Warmup

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Another unedited improv, recorded a month later than the one above. As the title suggests, this was just to get limbered up at the beginning of a session. It fades out once I lose the thread.

Everything We Do Is Right

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Maybe our best attempt at a longer-form improv.

Window remix

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Edited from over half an hour down to eight or so minutes. The original contains all these ideas, but they’re separated by some stretches of aimless wandering, and with looser repetition. I like it better this way.

Listening now, this stuff doesn’t nearly as tight or focused as our more pop and remix-oriented material we eventually moved into. But I admire the spirit of adventure behind it. My guitar playing certainly improved enormously under the pressure of all that recorded improvising. We never remotely found an audience for this music. It was too weird and avant-garde for the dance music people, not weird enough for the avant-garde, too unfocused and unpredictable for pop fans, too electronic for jazz fans. Still, I think it was a cool idea, one that I don’t think we came close to exploring completely. I’m still interested in pursuing this format further. Anybody out there game for some Eno-flavored freeform techno? Drop me a line.

A A7 Am

B7

C C7

D D7 Dm

E E7 Em

F

G G7

It’s not much good to just memorize these chords without musical context. It’s better to learn them grouped together into keys, so you can hear how they relate to each other. Family Guy explains how this works using the key of G. I apologize for the filthiness of the opening joke, but then it actually turns into a good music theory lesson.

Here are the standard fifteen grouped into various useful major, blues and minor keys. Pick a row and try the chords within it. They’ll sound good together in any order and in any combination. The first chord in each row is the tonic chord, which feels like home base.

Major keys

          I  ii  iii IV  V  vi    V/V  V/ii V/vi

C major:  C  Dm  Em  F  G7  Am    D7   A7   E7

G major:  G  Am  --  C  D7  Em    A7   E7   B7

D major:  D  Em  --  G  A7  --    E7   B7   --

A major:  A  --  --  D  E7  --    B7   --   --

E major:  E  --  --  A  B7  --    --   --   --

Blues

          I7  IV7 V7 bIII bVII

C blues:  C7  --  G7  --  --

G blues:  G7  C7  D7  --  F

D blues:  D7  G7  A7  F   C

A blues:  A7  D7  E7  C   G

E blues:  E7  A7  B7  G   D

Minor keys

          I bIII iv  IV  v   V  bVI bVII  V/V bVI7

D minor:  Dm  F  --  G7  Am  A7  --  C    E7  --

A minor:  Am  C  Dm  D7  Em  E7  F   G    B7  --

E minor:  Em  G  Am  A7  --  B7  C   D    --  C7

For more adventurous sounds, try mixing chords from different keys together. Trust your ears and have fun!

Update: once you’ve mastered these chords, maybe you’d like to tackle the pentatonic scale.