Mixing Blues Guitar Scales - Two Cool Sounding Guitar Licks
I’m excited about this guitar lesson! We’re going to look at two really cool sounding licks that combine both the Major Blues and Minor Blues scales. Combining these two scales is one of my favorite strategies for creating interesting bluesy guitar licks.
For this lesson we’ll create the licks by combining these two blues scales…
- B Major Blues scale
- B Minor Blues scale
Here are a couple of diagrams showing you the notes and scale degrees of the above two scales…
If you are new to blues scales, I recommend checking out the following lessons first. They will give you the necessary theory and technique that will help you get the most out of this lesson. (Once you’ve completed the three guitar lessons below, I’ll see you back here)…
All done? Fantastic! Let’s take a look at the first guitar lick now…
Mixing Blues Guitar Scales: Lick One
This guitar lick mainly sticks to the B Minor Blues scale. But if you look at the third to last note (D#), notice that I sneakily stuck in the 3 from the B Major Blues scale. Oh yeah, just in case you’re wondering. The numbers underneath the TAB are the fingers that I use to play each note.
Notice also how I have used hammer-ons and pull-offs in places. This gives the lick a nice, smooth and flowing sound to it.
Years ago I was watching an instructional video of fusion guitar god Scott Henderson, and he said something that really stuck with me…
“Don’t just learn the lick. Learn FROM the lick”.
I might have mixed up that quote a bit, but the overall is point is this. Don’t just learn this lick. Learn from it by analyzing it. To do this I highly recommend printing out this lesson and then work outing…
- The note name of every note in the lick.
- The scale degree of every note in the lick.
All clear? Now let’s check out the second guitar lick…
Mixing Blues Guitar Scales: Lick Two
This one combines the B Major Blues and B Minor Blues scales in a very mixed-up way. Like the first lick, it also uses a fair amount of hammer-ons and pull-offs. I really like the sound of these techniques when I’m playing bluesy stuff like this. You could pick all the notes if you wanted to, but I don’t think that it would sound as cool. 
Once you’ve learnt the lick as written, I really recommend analyzing the note names and scale degrees that it uses. Once you’ve done that, it would be a fun idea to make up your own licks.
Well…that’s all from me. I hope you enjoyed this lesson! If you would like to improve your guitar soloing by using an effective method of learning guitar scales, then I recommend checking out this information about the Guitar Scale Mastery membership website.