Solo Guitar – The Blues Scales

You have to know which notes you can play when you play a solo. A scale is set of notes. Not all notes on your fretboard would give a nice sound if played in one song; it must fit to the song and the chords.

We don’t have a choice the classical music theory is not well suited to describe the Blues. Blues is crazy and wrong from that point of view – playing dominant major 7th chords all over minor pentatonic scales, using a 5 tone scale instead of the accustomed 7 tone scales, using chromatic scale pieces for intros and turnarounds, adding notes that don’t belong to any scale – and these stupid chord progressions, so it’s only an attempt to describe what we call the Blues. Take the guitar: the frets are made for equal intonation, to play classical music. To get the notes between you need techniques like a string bend or a slide. The best ways to describe the Blues scale with standard music theory is using a pentatonic scale.