Just The One Breakfast
Published: Fri, 02/09/24
That said, I've been in bit of a words-first groove this FAWM. There's about an hour in the morning when only the family dog and I are up, enough time to possibly crank out a first lyric draft. If I pull that out later in the day at the studio and start thinking about music, that in turn is enough to prompt a second draft that is functional enough to demo in guitar-and-vocal form. No epic production for me this year, as fun as that can be; if I can get fourteen such demos up on my page before March first, that'll be a win.
I feel like I spend much of 2023 stripping things down, and I have to say, I'm a fan. There's a scene in the PBS adaptation of A Town Called Alice where someone is trying to order something, anything, besides steak and eggs for breakfast. "No," the waitress replies, "there's just the one breakfast." Most working musicians, myself included, both take both pride and find some degree of job security in attempting to operate as the creative equivalent of a Greek diner. But lately, whether it's February Album Writing Month, the handful of gigs I have coming up or the master classes I'm doing next week in New England, my take is pretty much: there's just the one breakfast.
When it comes to playing the blues, one could argue there's just the one scale. As a result, it's not hard to wind up in a love-hate relationship with minor pentatonics. On the one hand, pentatonic scales provide a quick and simple way to get up and running quickly with improvisation. On the other, well...it doesn't take much longer to feel somewhat trapped by the narrow confines of that very same scale.
While it seems the solution would be to learn more scales, the minor pentatonic sound, and its first cousin the blues scale, are the foundational sound of blues improvisation. A more useful pursuit, for my money, is to improve your relationship with the pentatonic scale itself. By adding just a few critical notes to the scale – the major thirds of the I, IV and V chords in the key – you can open up a whole new way of playing the blues, without ever really leaving the pentatonic scale behind.
That's what I cover in today's Youtube lesson. You can find it at the link below:
Get Out Of The Pentatonic Box
This month in the Fingerstyle Five membership, we're taking a deep dive into applying this very idea to improvising on the blues in A. To learn how to develop an entire solo from a few basic phrases, build a vocabulary of blues licks and turnarounds, and understand when, where and how to play the changes on the I IV and V chords, all with tab and video lessons available only inside the membership, sign up now for The Fingerstyle Five:
The Fingerstyle Five
More soon,
David
P.S. Details about next week's New Hampshire concerts are now available on my calendar page:
New Hampshire Shows