Swing For The Blues Guitarist

Published: Fri, 04/07/23

One summer at the National Guitar Workshop, I agreed to teach a one-off elective class on blues songwriting. I didn't really know quite what I was going to say about it – I loved blues and I liked good songwriting and I'm sure I had some kind of plan at the time. But if I did, it turned out to be totally moot, because on the afternoon in question, a small mob of about twenty-five or thirty guitar players showed up at my little classroom, none of whom had any real interest in becoming the next Willie Dixon.

"What are you all here for?" I asked. "We're here for the Blues Swing class," said the guy at the front of the mob, to a round of nods and "yeahs" from the rest. "'Blues Swing'?" I said. "What the heck is that?" "We don't know," came the reply. "But that's what it says down at the office. They have a whiteboard up, and next to your name it says 'Blues SW.'"

Well, a mob is a mob, no matter how benevolent and well-intentioned, so I turned on a dime and spent the next hour or two dishing the dirt on Freddie Green chord voicings and Charlie Christian licks. Apparently no other teacher was covering such things, so the next summer, somewhat more prepared, I came back to teach more of the same for a week-long class with the less ambiguous title Swing For The Blues Guitarist.

There's a pretty big difference between how blues musicians and swing musicians approach the twelve-bar form. But it really just comes down to these three things:
  1. Swing musicians view the blues chord progression itself differently from the way blues musicians do. If you can wrap your head around the swing version of the changes, the soloing will make a lot more sense.
  2. Blues musicians essentially wring everything they need out of one blues scale (or variations on it) based on the same root as the I chord of the progression they're playing. Swing musicians frequently transpose what they play on the I chord to the root of the IV chord and the root of the V chord when those chords arrive in the progression
  3. Bebop musicians, playing essentially an elaboration on the swing framework, use yet another variation on the basic blues progression, which they then address with additional chromatic notes and altered tones like b9 and b13.
You don't need to know any of that, really, to start wrapping your hands around some new sounds for your blues. In this week's lesson, I explain a bit of the philosophy of swing comping, demonstrate a few ways to use Freddie Green voicings as swing moves in their own right, and suggest a couple ways you might adapt those same voicings to enhance a fingerstyle blues groove in E. You can find all that at the link below:

Blues Chord Substitutions

Registration for the first Reliable Source workshop opens this Monday, April 10; look for more details and a sign-up link then.

More soon,

David
 
Develop your groove, build your repertoire and begin improvising with the Fingerstyle Five membership's organized, ongoing lessons. Learn more and sign up at fretboardconfidential.com

 
 
david@davidhamburger.com

P.O. Box 302151
Austin TX 78703
USA


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