[Tim Bowen]

Anything's cool as long as the Blues Police have met their monthly citation quota.

A common way to spice up the blues scale is to substitute the major 6th for the b7, which sweetens the sound a bit. Robben Ford likes this.

A good way to get into playing over blues changes is to learn the various inversions of tritones (3rds and b7ths) across I, IV, and V (dominant) chords. These notes will speak to the listener, as long as chicken grease is applied. Flat five sub understanding would be the next logical step.

Another approach is not so much harmonically inclined as it is stylistically:

* Set up the first chorus as if you were playing Gospel music in an old school southern baptist church. Base your ideas on sweet sounding 3rd and 6th intervals, and be sparing with b7ths. Set up the second chorus with mean sounding minor pentatonics, complete with minor 3rds over chords that contain major 3rds. For the third chorus, take one riff or lick and develop it over the entire progression, changes be damned.

* Set up a chorus with whatever fake pedal steel bends that you know, or play Wes Montgomery style thumb octaves, or with whatever other little tricks that your sonic toolbox offers.






I guess I think harmonically a lot like jazz tele. Here are the three main ways I use melodic minor scales:

I minor over I minor chord (root = root). This is great for Kenny Burrell type 12/8 minor blues. If the tune is a bit more funky and groovy - listen to the voicing of the I minor chord - if it's 1 -b7 -b3, there's a reason that the b3 is not included lower in the voicing - it can imply a 7#9, and therefore invite a sort of ambiguity, meaning that the I chord could be improvised over as a minor or a dominant chord. In this case, I like standard blues box with some color tones, not full on melodic minor. Another indicator of this (at least for me) is if the IV chord is a dominant chord as opposed to a minor chord, meaning that I'm going to treat the I minor in a more gutbucket (bluesbox) way, usually. If both the I and IV chords are minor, I'm inclined to color a bit more outside the lines (altered tensions). I sometimes dig playing IV minor as IV harmonic minor, which is a scale I treat with kid gloves.

Melodic minor up a fifth from the root of a dominant 7th chord. There's various ways to see it - major scale with #4/11 and b7; mixolydian mode with #4/11. It's called lydian dominant, usually. If I play the I7 chord with a #11, I'll do something else over the IV7 chord, or vice versa. It sounds a bit trite to include this color tone over both the I and IV chords. I like having a melody to relate sounds to - the melody that I suggest to students is the Simpson's theme, which is textbook lydian dominant.

Melodic minor up a half step from altered dominant chords. For me, this only really works on V7 altered chords. Sometimes a blues or blues rock tune will have an altered I7 chord. I hear fusion guitarists implying these sounds over I7 and IV7 chords all the time. To each his or her own. To me, it sounds rather stupid and forced over other than V7alt., but then there's no accounting for taste. When it comes to playing "outside", my tastes are decidedly old school.

Screwing with melodic minor scales over time starts to yield some very cool revelations. For instance, augmented arpeggios and whole tone patterns start to present themselves. As an example: play an A melodic minor scale over an A minor chord, or an A melodic minor scale over a D9 chord (melodic minor up a fifth from the root of a dominant chord, as noted above), and watch for augmented chords and arps (the most familiar shape here will likely be recognizable as an 'E' augmented chord - not surprisingly which would serve as V chord to the A minor's 'I' and/or the D9's 'IV').




Try playing minor7b5 arpeggios up a 3rd and a 6th from dominant chords. Lots of sweet and sour tones here, and this is one of my personal fave pets. Try ascending with the m7b5 arp, descending with wholetone, diminished, or chromatic ideas.

What I've found about these sounds is that contradictions are abundant. Music ain't math, although numbers are useful, and I hear differently than the next guy or gal.