Legos, Algebra and the Blues Up The Neck Workshop

Published: Fri, 03/11/22

It's been a while since anyone did much with Legos around my house, but I find myself making the Legos analogy all the time when I teach improvisation. It takes more than knowing this scale or that scale to improvise on the blues, as anyone who's tried to pour a single scale like maple syrup over a whole chord progression can attest. Starting to improvise is maybe best thought of as acquiring a set of building blocks – specific ideas or licks that you know will work a certain way, and can be fit together with or swapped out for other similarly-shaped building blocks.

And, as antithetical as it might sound to something fun like legos, I also find myself frequently making an algebra-like analogy about learning to improvise: namely, that it really helps to think in terms of constants and variables. That is, instead of thinking of improvising over all twelve bars of the blues right away, you can take a tune, or a worked-out solo – that's the constant – pick a specific two-bar section of the chord progression, and aim to try out a few different worked-out ideas in that same specific section of the progression every time it comes around. Those various two-bar ideas you'd try out would be the variables.

I've made another short video for Youtube about playing up the neck specifically using this constants-and-variables idea: specifically, in my new lesson "More Blues Licks Up The Neck," I talk a bit about coming up with double-stop licks that work specifically over the IV chord on an E blues – basically, when you go to A7 in bars 5 and 6 of a twelve-bar blues. You can find it at the link below:

Youtube – More Blues Up The Neck

This building-blocks idea is at the heart of my two-hour workshop this Saturday, Blues Up The Neck! 2.0. We'll be looking at how to play double-stops and chord voicings up the neck, but in particular we'll pay attention to how certain licks work over certain bars of the twelve-bar blues progression, and how thinking of licks that way can help you swap them around and start creating solos of your own.

I talk about this more in a video you can find on the registration page for the the workshop itself. Just click below and scroll down:

Blues Up The Neck 2.0 – Workshop Details and Registration

More soon,

David