Simple Blues Soloing System

The blues lives between the b3 and the 3. The pentatonic box doesn’t tell you that.

Most players learn the blues through the minor pentatonic box. Every note fits, none of it sounds like the records, and after a while every solo comes out the same. The box isn’t the problem. The problem is that it treats five notes as equals, and it leaves out the notes that make the blues sound like the blues.

This book swaps scales for three positions on the neck and a handful of intervals. You learn what each interval sounds like, what it’s for and where it sits. Then you add them one at a time, in the same order, in every position. There’s very little to memorise, because everything hangs off four notes.

Then it shows you how to make those intervals follow the chords, which is the part most blues books skip.

What’s in it:
The b3 to 3 bend, the 6, the blue note and the 2 (or 9), and what each one actually does. Three positions that cover nearly the whole neck, and how they overlap so you can slide from one to the next mid-solo. Which notes to land on over A7, D7 and E7, and the twelve-bar taken bar by bar with one note to aim for in each. How the same notes become the 9ths, 13ths and 7#9s when the chords get dressed up. A practice order, where the positions sit in every common blues key, and reference diagrams of all three positions with the chord tones for each chord.

Every diagram labels each note by its interval, so you always know what you’re playing.

Who it’s for: players who know a few chords, have probably got stuck in the pentatonic box, and want to sound like the blues rather than like a scale.

Revised 2026 edition. Rewritten and redrawn throughout, with a new chapter on playing the changes, a reference section and a practice plan.