Cool Soloing Hack for Bass Players (The Jazz Blues)
Soloing over the a blues chord sequence is lot tricker than first meets the eye (or ear!).
I'm not talking about simply shredding up and down the minor pentatonic scale or blues scale (guitar players - I'm calling you out, lol!) - I mean really outlining the changes of the sequence, and hitting all the juicy chord tones as they go by.
When I first began to solo on the bass (many moons ago), I actually found the blues sequence incredibly hard as I just couldn't get used to the movement of the first two dominant chords. I figured I wasn't alone, so began an epic transcription project where I took 5 great blues solos and learned them front to back trying to discover what techniques the greats were using when improvising over this common sequence.
To compress what I learned from that transcription project into one lesson would be utterly impossible as I learned so much - but, I did discover a cool hack that some players were using on the first two chords of the sequence - in fact, this hack fixed my issue with the two dominant chords that I was originally struggling with!
In this lesson I'm going to show you exactly what hack I discovered so you can get it into your playing - today!
Here's the chord sequence for the standard Jazz Blues progression:
| F7 | F7 | F7 | F7 |
| Bb7 | Bb7 | F7 | D7 |
| Gm7 | C7 | F7 D7 | Gm7 C7 ||
The scales used are:
- F7 - Bars 1-4
- F Minor Blues Scale - Bars 5&6
- F7 - Bar 7
- F# Diminished - Bar 8
- Combination of outlining the chords and F major - Last 4 Bars
Just a heads up: this is in no way the only way to solo over a jazz blues sequence. There are multiple ways of approaching improvisation over this common progression - this is just a great way of getting started.
As always, see you in the shed...
Scott :)
PS. I also want to give a huge shout out to Mark (Mongoose), who's one of our Academy members. The lesson you're about to watch is a clip from one of my weekly student focus seminars within the Academy where I give Academy students direct feedback and advice each week. This video was my response to Mark, who's been submitting some great videos over the last few months - and as always, it's a pleasure to here him play, and hear the progress he's making every week.
If you wanna check out the Academy, you can try it out for 14 days totally free by clicking here.
