Phrasing feeling stale? Learn how to break down the more vocal side of melody and rhythm.
Chops: Intermediate
Theory: Beginner
Lesson Overview:
• Let blues vocalists inspire your phrasing.
• Get more mileage from your licks by varying their rhythmic patterns.
• Emulate the call-and-response style of such blues masters as B.B. King, Freddie King, and Magic Sam. Click here to download a printable PDF of this lesson's notation.
“Phrasing” is a term that gets thrown around a lot when people talk about improvisation, and I remember being baffled by this as a kid learning to play. Especially when some rocker would sound off about how awesome his phrasing was in a Guitar Player interview and the next month all the jazz cats would write in to laud the phrasing of their favorite bebopper while unflatteringly comparing said rocker’s phrasing to the flatulence of various barnyard denizens. “Wow,” I would think, “this phrasing thing is clearly a big deal,” while remaining pretty oblivious of what the word really meant.
It turns out phrasing is basically just how you play the things you play. At its most fundamental, it’s where your ideas or licks start and stop within the rhythmic and harmonic pulse of the music. Getting into more detail, it’s your attack and tone and dynamics and personal timing—all the essential details that make you sound like yourself. But for the purpose of this lesson, we’ll stick with the first part: Phrasing is where you put the notes, relative to the chord progression going by.
Specifically, we’re going to explore how modeling the shape, length, and resolution of your ideas on the form of classic blues lyrics can serve as a shortcut to great phrasing over a 12-bar blues. Contouring your playing to the lyric structure of the blues almost automatically results in space, call-and-response sounds, and ideas that draw the listener through each subsequent turning point in the form.
To begin, think about the melody to a classic like “Sweet Home Chicago.” It has a short opening phrase, followed by a longer answer: “da-DAH … DAH-da-DAH-da DAH, DAH-da.” You can hear similar phrasing on blues standards like “Everyday I Have the Blues” and “I’m Tore Down.” Below are a few examples of how established guitar masters performed these tracks.
Magic Sam, “Sweet Home Chicago”
B.B. King, “Everyday I Have the Blues”
Freddie King, “I’m Tore Down”
Ex. 1 is the guitar equivalent: a short phrase (just two notes!) that lands on the downbeat of measure one, beat 1, answered by a longer phrase that starts at the beginning of measure two and ends on the and of 4, right on the doorstep of measure three. Notice how the next couple of measures are left empty—the same way the lyrics leave some breathing room (both literally and metaphorically) in “Sweet Home Chicago.”
Click here for Ex. 1
The second line of many blues lyrics is a repeat of the first line, although, because it is a repeat, singers often work some kind of variation into the melody. You can do this too, by starting your phrases a little earlier or a little later. Just make sure they still resolve in the same place rhythmically, as in Ex. 2.
Click here for Ex. 2
The third line is generally where both the lyrics and their melody have the biggest change-up, and “Sweet Home Chicago” is a perfect example of this shift. In Ex. 3, the guitar equivalent opens with a short pickup into the downbeat, just like lines 1 and 2, but with new melodic material, and a phrase that doesn’t resolve until beat 3 of measure nine. The answer, which takes you from IV back to I, can be similar to the answers in lines 2 and 3, or a place to insert something new and different.
Click here for Ex. 3
Cool, so there’s the lyric form—six phrases that take you through a 12-bar blues with the same overall shape and balance as a blues lyric. Now let’s look at a few ways we can build on this framework.
For starters, we can loosen up the phrasing a little. For example, instead of resolving your licks on the first beat of a measure, typically by finishing your phrase on the root, you can delay that resolution a little further into the measure, as in measure one of Ex. 4, or land on the root and keep playing, as in measure three.
Click here for Ex. 4
We can also draw out the pickup that launches each line, using phrases that start on, say, the and of 1 rather than the and of 3 or 4. Ex. 5 makes the first and second phrases a little more symmetrical, and less like “Sweet Home Chicago,” but still retains the call-and-response feel.
Click here for Ex. 5
If you do stick to the short-long phrases of the lyrics, there’s a handful of space between your first and second phrase, and a lot of space at the end of each line. Space is great, space is tasteful—and you don’t want to pack all the space full of stuff—but such spaces afford you the opportunity to play your own rhythm guitar hits, which, like space, will contrast nicely with your lead lines (Ex. 6).
Click here for Ex. 6
If we’re still thinking about this as a vocal approach, we could also use the space at the end of the line for what we all know it’s really best for: guitar fills! Play your call-and-response “vocal lines” in the first couple of measures, then play fills—short licks that respond to all of that—towards the end of each line (Ex. 7).
Click here for Ex. 7
We’ve been using somewhat consistent licks for lines 1 and 2 throughout the longer examples to keep the focus on how we’re varying things rhythmically, but changing up your licks more from line to line will create further variety, even as the rhythmic shape of the lyric form continues to lend your soloing a satisfying sense of direction and structure. Check out Ex. 8 and see if you can still hear the call-and-response phrasing, the resolution of each phrase, and the overall lyric shape of things, despite incorporating all the various changes we’ve discussed so far.
Click here for Ex. 8
One more thing, as far as playing over the first line. On the second verse of Freddie King’s “I’m Tore Down,” you can hear the lyrics double up in the first line. It happens over stop-time in the rhythm section, but it works even if the band keeps playing as usual.
As applied to soloing, you can think of it as squeezing a sort of ABAC structure into the first four measures of the form: a short lick in measure one, an answer in measure two, a repeat of the original lick in measure three, and an answer to all of that in measure four, in a way that carries on and resolves to the IV chord at the start of measure five.
For a similar instrumental take on this idea, check out the ensemble riff that leads into Duane Allman’s solo on the Allman Brothers Band version of “Done Somebody Wrong” from the Fillmore recordings.
Ex. 9 illustrates one way to apply this idea to the kind of licks we’ve been playing. Once you’ve grasped the concept, try dropping it into the first four measures of one of the longer solos above.
Click here for Ex. 9
Working with the lyric form is not only a great way to develop your phrasing and breathe some space into your solos, it’s a way to go beyond generic jamming to create solos with a real musical connection to the songs you’re playing on. So before you start wailing, take a moment to listen to the words, and you’ll be overflowing with ideas in no time.
Understand how masters of beatnik-blues such as Grant Green and Kenny Burrell effortlessly weaved chord hits within their solos.
Chops: Intermediate
Theory: Intermediate
Lesson Overview:
• Develop a call-and-response approach to soloing over a 12-bar blues.
• Outline the changes of a blues in the style of Grant Green, Kenny Burrell, and Ed Bickert.
• Learn how to anticipate a chord change with both single-note lines and half-step chord approaches.
Click here to download a printable PDF of this lesson's notation.
There are a lot of good reasons to incorporate chord hits into your soloing. For one thing, they help to fill in the groove and the harmonic landscape when you’re playing with just bass and drums. For another, they can reference the call-and-response sound of playing with a horn section or keyboardist. Finally, and maybe most usefully, by operating like cones on a race course, playing chord hits forces you to create and play well-defined phrases, which gives your solos clarity and momentum. In this lesson, we’ll go through several different ways to add chord hits to a mid-tempo blues in Bb.
Our first move is to play chord hits on the way into the downbeat, then answer with single-note licks. In Ex. 1, we start out by approaching the 3 and b7 (also known as a tritone) of the I chord, Bb, from a half-step below. The syncopation of playing on “4 and” creates room to answer with a single note lick after the downbeat. We repeat this half-step move on the way into measure 3, then use a similar half-step move to get into the Eb7 chord just before measure 5. You could carry this process through the rest of the 12-bar progression, as well.
Click here for Ex. 1
Alternatively, we could play single-note licks into the downbeat, as in Ex. 2, and use chord hits for the post-downbeat replies. This time, instead of just the chord’s 3 and b7, we’re using 9th-chord voicings. There’s a horn section vibe to the way the voicings shift from Bb7 to Eb7 (I to IV) and in the use of half-step motion on beat 4 when the progression returns to Bb7, the I.
Click here for Ex. 2
Let’s see how this second idea—licks followed by chord hits—works over a whole 12-bar solo. Groove-wise, Ex. 3 is more in the vein of an organ trio. The triple-stop answers are the kind of thing Hammond B-3 wizard Jimmy Smith uses on tunes like “Midnight Special” and “Back at the Chicken Shack.”
On the I chord, we’re hammering on from b3 to 3 on the 3rd string, barring with the ring finger to imply the IV chord and then repeating the hammer-on move to the I. On the IV chord, we start out with the top three strings of an Eb9 voicing, then use our ring finger to play the same shape up two frets to imply an Eb6 sound. Notice there are no chord hits over bars 9 and10 (F7 and Eb7); blowing straight through the turnaround with single-note soloing provides a release from the preceding rhythmic pattern, and the contrast gives the solo a kind of AAB structure that feels satisfying and conclusive. (Note: We’re not counting the pickup measure as measure 1. Rather, we’re numbering measures in the 12-bar form itself, which means measure 1 falls under the initial Bb7.)
Click here for Ex. 3
In Ex. 4, we’re back to using chord hits before the downbeat and single notes after, but here we’re taking more of a swing approach, choosing voicings that will spell out the transition from one chord change to the next. Heading into the first downbeat, we’re half-stepping into Bb13 from above (B13). It’s a classic move that you could also analyze as resolving from an altered V chord (F7#9) to I. We repeat that move at the end of measure 2 and at the end of measure 10. At the end of measure 4, the altered chord, Bb7b13, resolves to Eb9. In measure 6, Bbº7 resolves to Bb13, and in measure 8, we’ve got another half-step approach, from bVI (Gb9) to V (F9).
Click here for Ex. 4
Finally, in Ex. 5 we make room for some longer solo lines by concentrating the chord hits at the end of every line—in measures 3-4, 7-8, and 11-12. At the same time, we’re applying the swing aesthetic of outlining chord transitions to a jazz-blues progression that includes the I-VI-IIm-V changes. The cool four-note Bb13 and F7b13 voicings in measures 11-12 are straight out of Tele-wielding jazzer Ed Bickert’s vocabulary. Whether you want to take this idea further into a jazz direction, or just swipe some ideas to bring back into your blues, he’s the cat for that.
Click here for Ex. 5
Any one of these five approaches can work as a structured way to open a solo, a great way to climax it, or an effective way to mix things up in the middle. The more you work with chord hits and get comfortable grabbing them on the fly, the more you’ll find yourself mixing and matching these approaches and working out new ideas of your own.