Learn All Five Shapes Of The Minor Blues Scale
The Blues scale is the second most common scale guitar players use when they improvise. To build it, all you do is add the b5 to the Minor Pentatonic.
If you have been calling out the intervals as you practised your Minor Pentatonic, you will know where all your 4th and 5th intervals are in each shape. To build the Blues scale, simply add the b5 in between!
Knowing where the intervals are within the scale is the key to being able to just add a note like this to the shapes.
Later, when you learn the minor modes, you will do this again, but with other intervals.
Above, you find all five shapes of the blues scale in the key of Am. When you can play this, move on to the remaining 11 keys as well as move through the cycle of 4th. Next up is Dm, Gm, Cm etc.
Connect Minor Blues Shapes
The next exercise connects all five shapes of the Blues scale. Don’t expect to nail this on your first go, just take it slowly, in time you’ll get it.
Once you’re cool with playing this in Am as I do in the video, crack on with Dm, Gm, etc, all the way around the cycle of 4th.
Triplets are used in this connect shapes exercise. As well as triplets, why not play this exercise using 16th notes?
The more ways you can find to vary the rhythm of an exercise, the quicker you’ll complete it. You could for example choose whatever rhythm you are working on with your chromatic exercises.
Closest Possible Minor Blues Shape
Your final Blues scale exercise moves to the closest shape possible as we go through your favourite cycle, the cycle of 4th!
Just like when you practised the Minor Pentatonic, the movement of this exercise flows like this: Em shape – Am shape – Dm shape – Gm shape – Cm shape.
When you’ve played through five shapes, start on the root of Bb, play an Em shape, and continue up the fretboard.
When you can play this exercise at a high BPM, stop practising the Blues scale shapes and move on to a scale I invented and called Conspirian. Everyone else is already playing it, they just didn’t name it!
Minor Blues Scales Improvisation
As soon as you feel comfortable playing the blues scale up and down in all shapes and keys, you must switch your focus to making music with it.
A good place to start is to do what I’m doing above, play it without any chords and aim to hear the sound of the scale in isolation.
Target notes such as m3rd and b7 and find ways to make use of that b5,
When this feels OK, the next step is to find it used in real songs. For example, Sunshine Of Your Love’s riff is based on it.
But there are many more songs that use this scale, find them among the intermediate acoustic course and especially, the intermediate electric course.
Minor Blues Scale | Related Pages
Minor Scales | Step-by-step guitar course
Using the CAGED system and the Minor Pentatonic as our foundation, we can build all possible minor scales.
The minor scales course takes care of this in just 8 steps. All you have to do is put the time in, following the step-by-step format.
Intermediate Acoustic Course
In the Intermediate Acoustic Course, we don’t settle for just the basic open-position chords. Instead, we move up the fretboard to play what is called barre chords.
Learning these tunes will unlock the guitar fretboard as we use the CAGED system to explore the fretboard in the context of each song.
Intermediate Electric Course
When playing Motown & Soul tunes, we must know all CAGED barre chords and pentatonic scales to build rhythm parts, incorporate licks and play solos.
Complete the Intermediate Electric Course and you will map out the fretboard, as well as gain an understanding of how to create a guitar part that works in a band.
Min7b5 | Arpeggios
There’s an interesting connection between the minor blues scale and the min7b5 arpeggios, replace the 4th and 5th with the b5!
Video lessons are available starting on an A. To complete this step, you must play starting on the remaining 11 notes as well.
Guitar Chords | The CAGED System
With traditional music theory, the stave, and a piano, you’ll get easy-to-understand chords but they will not help if you want to play chords on the guitar.
Instead, on the guitar we use chord shapes derived from the five open-position chords, C, A, G, E, and D, hence CAGED.
Chordacus
Spytunes chords, scale, and arpeggio software, Chordacus is a refined version of the so-called CAGED system.
Now available as both a chromatic (original version) and “within a key”, developed with the help of a Spytunes student.
Sunshine Of Your Love | Chords + Lyrics
You can learn how to play Sunshine Of Your Love by Cream using chords, lyrics, chord analysis, and Spytunes video guitar lessons.
| D blues scale riff | D blues scale riff |
It’s getting near dawn…
About me | Dan Lundholm
This was a guitar lesson about the Minor Blues Scale, by Dan Lundholm. Discover more about him and learn guitar with Spytunes.
Most importantly, find out why you should learn guitar through playing tunes, not practising scales, and studying theory in isolation.