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Spicing up a 12-Bar Solo
from Brad Carlton’s Jazzed Blues Assembly Lines
In this month’s lesson, we’re going to look at a hard-hitting, funky 12-bar blues solo. While we won’t go into individual pieces of the solo puzzle, such as why we’re playing the notes that we do, we will be discussing how to add variations, such as keyboard double- stops, syncopated phrasing and a touch of jazz language.
Consider the transcribed solo as your template – you’ll be taking the same ideas and phrases contained within and editing them to create a new solo. This is important to remember, because you don’t want to have to keep coming up with new ideas. You want to be able to take what you’ve done before and simply put a different twist on it.
Our solo opens with a classic Grant Green repetition, blended with double-stops borrowed from blues and jazz organists. Then it’s C minor blues and double-stops over the next pair of bars leading back to the C7 chord. The solo finishes off with a solid C minor pentatonic sequence, ala George Benson.
So how could you vary some of these ideas to create a new solo without a lot of effort? Let’s start at the beginning. The opening phrase creates a repetitious motif between the 5, the b7 and the 1 before a nice double-stop. If we look to traditional blues forms, especially those influenced by organ players, these double-stop licks can really be used and recycled to add some great rhythm emphasis. Thus, one solution to freshening up the first line of this solo is as simple as flipping the first two bars – with the second bar first, we can start off by playing some tasty double-stops, perhaps as quarter notes before heading into that repetitious 5, b7 and 1 motif. You can also experiment with taking licks from measure 4 and using those to kick the solo off.
When we arrive at the F7 in measures 5 and 6, you’ll notice we use a fairly strong, vertical lick to start. As we mentioned earlier, you could flip those two measures for a completely different feel. Start with measure 5 and you have fast 16th notes giving you a sort of slingshot momentum as you approach the turn back to C7; if you begin with measure 6, you can use those funky doublestops to give the solo more of a rhythmic grounding. As long as you don’t wander away from the chord tones in those two measures, you can really experiment with time to change the entire feel of the solo.
In measures 9 and 10 we revisit the repetitious theme we developed at the very beginning of the solo – this would be another great place to fill in some funky double-stops if you want a more rhythmic feel to the solo. Otherwise, you could dispense with the slides and just blaze full-speed ahead to the final C blues run. The last two bars are an opportunity to let that inner improv artist out. Hopefully a few of these ideas will inspire you to shift around those solo ideas you’ve been playing for years. Begin by editing one or two bars at a time; see how little changes inspire you to change more. With a little rearranging and a little exploration, you can come up with fresh-sounding solos that don’t require reinventing the wheel.
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