Hey, how ya doing? :)

We apologize for the quality of this recording. We forgot to turn on the HD option when recording our Zoom sessions in the Settings. 😑 Beginner mistake - sorry! A full transcript of the session can be found below. We hope that helps!

Cheers,

JustinGuitar Team.

Recommended Lessons

Beginners

Grade 2 - Open E Minor Pentatonic Scale

Grade 2 - The A Minor Pentatonic Scale

Grade 2 - Beginner Blues Solo

Grade 2 - Easy Blues Improvisation On Guitar

Grade 3 - Legato Pentatonics

Grade 3 - Introduction To Vibrato Techniques

Intermediate

Grade 4 - Essential Blues Lead Guitar

Grade 4 - Blues Licks

Grade 5 - Transcribing Blues Solos

Grade 6 - Blues Solos All Over

💬 Community - Richard's Tips

I'd also recommend checking out the Community topic First Steps in Blues Improvisation using Minor Pentatonic Scale Pattern 1 from my Approved Teacher, Richard Coles, who moderated our Live Class. If you need to learn more about this topic, consider booking a private lesson with Richard!

TRANSCRIPT!

Welcome to the first Blues with Justin live stream. I was playing over a bit of a Blues in G there, and as you might have seen by the title of this little stream, it's going to be all about licks. I've taken a load of questions on board and will try and intersperse the questions as we go through. The general idea with this is (just so we all get what's going on here) we're still trying this new platform technology, which is fairly new to me. The idea of doing the stream, trying to figure out how to use my YouTube camera setup and the studio all together, so if stuff goes wrong, please bear with me. I'm also watching the chat and figuring this out as I go along.

If you've got any questions, there will be a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. Please put questions in the Q&A box. My co-host Richard, one of the Approved Teachers, will try and flag some questions for me for later in the chat. If you want to chat with each other and chat about anything else, then use the chat. The name says it all there, really, doesn't it?

I'm pleased that we hit our capacity as well. If we've hit a thousand people in the room, that's amazing. I had no idea it would be so popular, so thank you very much for being interested. That's cool.

I will start by reviewing a few of the questions that people submitted and try to talk our way through them. Mark Holland asked, "Can you learn the blues really, or are you predisposed to the ability?" Anybody can learn to play music, absolutely anybody. Most of what people acquire are skill sets; they learn things. Some people are predisposed to music, sports, and art and have some natural genetics that make them or help them learn faster. Young people tend to learn much faster than older people because of neuroplasticity, but anyone can learn to do it.

There are many technical things about music, or if you want to play complicated shred metal stuff, it requires a lot of hours, muscle memory, and working out, you know, guitar gymnastics. But Blues is very much language-based, and that's what we're going to be talking about mostly in this lesson. It will be about how important it is to learn and practice licks, which are much more important than scales. Most of the chat I'm doing today is stuff I regularly deliver in my in-person workshops because I see people improvising on the first day, and I'm like, "Guys, you got to stop with this scale stuff because scales are just an alphabet. That's all they are, and if you don't learn to use licks and learn to use words when you improvise, it doesn't make sense."

I don't know how quickly you all managed to join in at the beginning of the stream when we admitted everyone, but what I tried to do there at the beginning was each 12 Bar section. I mainly just played one lick. It might not have sounded like one lick, but it was all based on one little theme, one word I was exploring for a 12-bar cycle. So, just on that point, Greg said, "I'm pretty confident playing pentatonic scales in all five patterns. I know where all the root notes are, but I don't know many licks or fully understand how to target notes other than the root." The key thing is, "I don't know many licks." "I'd like to understand what to do next to make better music rather than playing around in the pattern. I can play all five patterns, concentrating on minor pentatonic. I can play major but plan to understand fully…" We don't need to worry about majors yet.

The big deal here is playing licks instead of patterns because if you play patterns, it sounds like ... I'm going to use speaking French as an analogy. I've got very bad French, but I've been in France a little bit. I've learned a few words here and there. The French alphabet and the English alphabet are the same or very similar. If I went into a shop and went ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP, they might recognize that "Oh, maybe he's trying to say some of the letters of the alphabet," but it wouldn't say anything. If I wanted to communicate with somebody in France, I'd be much better off learning a simple word like 'merci.' And as soon as I learn that one word, I'm communicating in that language, and people recognize it as that language.

I will put a different backing track on now, one in the key of A, and this would be a really good test for you, something that you might want to try. I recommend this. In classes, I get people up to demonstrate this, but online, I haven't figured out how to do that yet. But try to see if you can record yourself playing a solo over a backing track and then analyze it and understand what you're doing. I will often do what most people do at workshops with a backing track. Here we go.

You might do something like that, and it's not bad. It's not horribly out of tune, but it's not saying much; it's just running the scale. One of my favorite things is seeing somebody take a solo and start from the lowest root note. If that's you, definitely stop doing that. At the very least, always start on the highest root note because you have a better chance of accidentally stumbling on a word.

I mucked around in three or four of the patterns there, playing up and down the scale. Some people have learned a bit of bending, so might throw some string bending in there as well. But unless it's based on a lick, it won't sound like Blues. It's really important; it won't sound like blues until you use the words in the Blues language, and everybody uses the same words. Let me do the same thing, but I will use a word now. It's Albert King style. It's just a bend from pattern 2. How much better does it sound to do a little solo using just that word? I'm just going to try that one thing.

I hope you enjoyed hearing that second one more than the first one. Even though I used one lick, four notes, like three positions on the guitar plus the bend, there's a lot more mileage in it. It says more, and people immediately recognize it as bluesy because you're playing a blues word.

Now, the analogy that I like to use with this, extending the analogy of language, is if you wanted to be a creative musician, you might go, "I'm not going to learn other people's licks. I want to do my licks. I'm not going to bother learning anybody's licks at all. I'm going to be a unique blues guitar player, and I'm going to make up all my own words." So, you sit down and make up a whole load of your words, but it won't be Blues because you're not using the right language.

Imagine if you were a poet, and you went, "I'm not going to use any of these words that everybody's using to communicate. I'm going to make up my own words, and I'm going to write my poetry using my own words." Great, you could write the most beautiful poetry ever written, and no one will understand it because people don't know your words. It's important, and I think a really clear and good way of understanding that this is true because I'm not making this stuff up, is if you listen to a bit of Blues, you'll soon discover that most of the stuff that Eric Clapton is doing comes from people that have gone before him, and that's not to take anything away. He's a poet and beautifully uses words because poetry is about putting the same words that we all use together in unique and beautiful ways. That is the answer. So, when we hear a blues guitar player doing something amazing, it's not that they've made up their own words. They've put the words together that we know and love in a beautiful way that we connect with. Right? The licks thing is really what it's all about.

Another common misconception I wanted to discuss is that if you learn licks from somebody, you'll end up sounding just like them and won't have any of your own identity. And there is a tiny bit of truth in that idea. If you only learned licks from one person exclusively, and you practice just those licks, and you practice playing in that person's style, you will end up doing a great impersonation of that person, and there probably won't be much of you. So, one thing to bear in mind while we start talking about licks and how I'm encouraging you to collect them is to find the licks that you connect with from lots of different people, and then you put all of those licks together, which will form your vocabulary.

So, my vocabulary and your vocabulary and any other blues guitar player playing solo will be different vocabularies. Therefore, you're going to sound a little different. It would often be very challenging to sound like someone else if you wanted to. If you wanted to sound like Albert King, you could get it together, but it would take a lot of work and years of practice.

<>Stevie Ray Vaughan is another common one. Many people spend a lot of time trying to sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, and you can get pretty close, and those people, if their mission on the guitar is to sound really like Stevie Ray Vaughan, that's a doable mission. If your mission were to be your artist and develop your style, that wouldn't be a great idea. You'd want to be drawing your vocabulary from a range of different people.

Now, to another question, this one's from Toby Madman, a Justin Guitar Community Forum regular who asked why I don't teach licks with a backing track in the course. Now, I teach licks with a backing track in my Useful Blues Solos, a transcribing pack I sell on the site, but in the course, I don't teach the blues licks in a specific context. Learning licks in a specific context can be helpful, but it can also make you think they belong in a specific place. One of the interesting things about blues licks is that they can be used in many different ways. Like, most licks translate to different keys and lots of different styles, lots of different tempos. You could use it in a fast blues, a slow blues, a 12/8 blues, a minor blues. All of these different types of blues will often use the same licks. Suppose you are doing my Essential Blues Lead course, where I teach the five licks in each pentatonic pattern. In that case, I'd recommend taking those licks and then using them in lots of different blues backing tracks so you get a bit of a feeling for how those licks would work and where they don't work because sometimes, they don't. I'm not exclusively saying that all blues and learning Blues are the same as learning a spoken language, but most of it holds. So, the answer, Toby, is that both things are valid, and you should work on both. I will talk more about learning licks in a context or a specific style and practicing along with the original recordings in a minute, but that's helpful. But also, learning licks as an individual thing could be helpful too.

The next obvious question I will try to answer is, should I learn scales, and why do I bother teaching scales if they've got very little to do with it, and you should be learning licks anyway? Why should you learn scales? There are a couple of reasons why learning scales are a good idea. The first one is that they're good finger exercises, particularly in the late beginner and early intermediate stages. It's just good to get your fingers moving around. So, learning to target strings individually, muting the other strings, all of those kinds of things that we teach in the courses, it's a good idea to learn the scales for that reason. It also trains our musical imagination to know where the sounds are. So, if you've been practicing it 40,000 times when you hear it on the record, you'll probably know what is happening. It feels and sounds like that thing you've practiced a lot. It's building the sounds that make up the language, the alphabet. It's reinforcing the alphabet in your musical imagination. So, as you start trying to find or learn new licks, you know how to do it.

Another question: "When first learning improvisation, how can I play the scales I'm learning so that they sound musical and not rigid?" The answer is by playing licks instead of scales. I'm not saying you should never practice scales, but practicing scales over a backing track has limited value. I'm not saying it's worthless, maybe not bad just for working on your timing and stuff like that, but improvising is based on licks. Some licks are very scale-based, particularly number patterns, where you apply a mathematical number pattern to a scale, just down off each note. So, there are times when playing a scale or a scale in a melodic pattern can become a lick. For example, if I play it in a certain way, it sounds much more like a lick than just playing straight out of the scale.

Now, if licks are so important and scales are readily available all over the internet, where do the licks come from? There isn't a definitive book of licks, though there are books you can buy that have licks. I suggest using the licks in my Blues courses as a starting point. I've carefully selected them because they're common words you're likely to encounter as you progress in learning the language. Once you've learned a lick, you'll recognize it when you hear it on a record. So, getting a basic understanding of the different licks you're likely to encounter is beneficial.

The best way to get licks, and how I got them when I first started learning lead guitar, was from records. These days, you can listen to Spotify or any music streaming platform. I'll listen to music from artists I like, such as Freddie King and Robin Ford, and when I hear a lick I like, I'll sit down and work out how to play it. It's okay if you can't listen to a lick and figure it out immediately. You have to develop the ability to work out licks gradually. If you've done some of my courses and learned some of the common licks, you'll find that other licks are similar to ones you've already learned.

The course I mentioned, "Transcribing Blue Solos," is a collection of five solos with backing tracks. I listened to artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, and Albert King, wrote down some of their classic licks, and played them over a backing track. The idea is for you to work out those solos. When I was growing up, I didn't have tabs. I had to listen to the music multiple times and figure out the licks. Often, I got them wrong, but as long as they sounded close enough, that was okay.

I encourage you to transcribe solos independently as you get deeper into Blues. Choose your targets wisely. Don't start with something complicated like Ray Vaughan. Go back and try transcribing some BB King, Albert King, or Freddie King. The Kings are amazing for this stuff. Go back a bit further to T-Bone Walker or Chuck Berry. A lot of the vocabulary came from back there. T-Bone Walker, in particular, was a strong pioneer of the Blues vocabulary. I'm trying to go back and reach a little further back to Robert Johnson to find the vocabulary, but all of those things, you know, are all way back from T-Bone. He's a good guy, a bit jazzy, so some people might find that a little bit of a struggle. He's not minor pentatonic; he's minor pentatonic plus some extra notes, which we'll discuss later. Find the people you like, and if you're unsure who you like, open your ears up and listen to a bunch of stuff. Just type in blues into Spotify and go, "I never heard of that guy. Let's listen to some of his songs." If it's not your cup of tea, try another guy. When you find a little lick or a phrase that connects with you, see if you can work it out.

Another very good question that showed up here is, "What can you do if you want to play and learn licks but you're not up to the bending yet?". Bending is going to come further down the line anyway. Honestly, string bending is a key part of the Blues vocabulary. Bending and vibrato are two things that you need to play the Blues. If you can't bend, you will struggle to play many of the most common words in the Blues language. Some don't involve bending, particularly if you go back to the acoustic blues, like the Robert Johnson era, where there wasn't much bending. There was a slide guitar, which emulates bending, so I think that's where some sounds started coming from. But that vocabulary is almost like old English, "Oh ye merry gentlemen." They're words that we don't find as commonly used in modern Blues as phrases that use string bending.

Generally speaking, I consider the correct time for people to learn Blues lead guitar is when they start learning to bend. Now, learning to do string bending is relatively simple if you do it correctly. I'm not going to turn this video into a whole thing about string bending, but if you get the technique correct, it's not particularly difficult. It isn't easy on acoustic guitar. So, I will discuss all these things today are based on the electric guitar. I will do a different thing about playing solo Blues on acoustic guitar and how you play independently. That will be one of these streams for a bit later on down the way.

But to start, you want to think, "Okay, I want to get into Blues. I think I'm ready to try bending," and then you need to practice it. Now, I've got loads of videos on string bending, so you might want to go and check those out. The whole deal, though, to give a quick recap, is a motion with the hand, not just with the fingers. The muscles in our fingers are really small, so trying to push a string up with our fingers doesn't happen. If I push with my hand, I use my arm and forearm to make the motion. So, if I put my fingers forward, leaving the palm of my hand facing perpendicular to the arm of the guitar, and I fold my fingers forward, I can use my hand and arm to do the string bend.

If you get that technique right, string bending isn't that difficult. I'm not saying you'll get it in five minutes, and you won't. It will take some practice, like almost everything else we learn. It takes a bit of hard work and frustration, "Oh, I can't do this, I'm never going to be able to do it," but suddenly you keep practicing, "Alright, I can do it now." So, if you want to get into Blues lead guitar, I suggest you explore string bending. It should be part of your routine. In my Essential Blues Lead Guitar course, I suggest you practice the five licks in pattern one, practice using them, and practice string bending and getting it in tune.

String bending is done in tune. If you're bending note G, you're bending it to note A. And when you practice it, you should do it so you hear the note that it's supposed to sound like, and then you practice doing that bend. It's not arbitrary, and again, this is one of those things the guys that play scale up and down when they're soloing quite often get into this idea of bending, and they just bend a bit willy-nilly, and it generally doesn't sound good. The blues has some notes where you can bend them just slightly. I call it a blues curl. It's usually the minor third of the key, so in the key of A, anytime I play a note C, I can give it a little quarter-tone bend.

Again, this is covered in my Blues course if you want more detail. The string bend would be like the 'r' in French, where these sounds are peculiar to the language and very important. If you don't get them right, you'll never quite have the correct inflections. It's almost like an accent. It would be like doing those little things. Putting the little tweak on the 'C' would be like having an accent. That's important; that makes it sound correct. If you leave it off, it just doesn't quite work. So, they are little things, but they make a difference.

Nick Cook asked, "How to speak the language and how to practice?" So, part of the important journey many people miss out on is listening to what real Blues sounds like. Now, I made that mistake. I learned a lot of Blues and stuff from books, and I had ideas of things. I did a lot of transcribing, but most of my mistakes in this area involved jazz. When I played Blues, I mostly listened to and learned from records. But for some reason, when I got into jazz guitar, which is another language, most of the things I'm talking about to do with Blues also apply to Jazz. It's more cerebral, but it's the same kind of idea. But rather than listening to a lot of jazz, I was buying jazz lick books and trying to learn all these licks and figure out the maths of it rather than just listening to it. And I didn't learn it as well because of that.

So, if you want to embark on a journey playing some blues guitar, make sure you're doing a good dose of listening to it so you know what you should sound like. If you don't know what it should sound like, it will be difficult to make your playing sound like that. So, try to dig into stuff. One of the key things that people miss out on often is that repetition of a small amount of something is more powerful than listening to many different things, at least for me. When I'm trying to digest something, I immerse myself in it as much as possible. The week before last, it was Big Bill Broonzy. I'm writing a blues course for next year, and one of the guys I'm trying to study is Big Bill Broonzy. Incredible guy, a lot of people aren't aware of him. Some of the Eric Clapton acoustic things are direct arrangements done by Big Bill.

So, rather than just listening to a whole bunch of random things, I picked one record and listened to it repeatedly, trying to get it into my musical imagination. So that when I go to transcribe it in a week or two, I've got a better idea of what it should sound like before I start thinking about transcribing it properly. And also, those inflections, when you've listened to the same thing repeatedly, you know what it sounds like. Again, using the language analogy, if you're going to Spain, you probably buy one of those Spanish language cassettes where they give you all the phrases, and the idea is that you listen to them repeatedly and try to repeat them. So, it's the same that we're trying to go for on guitar. You want to hear a phrase you're trying to learn and make it sound right.

And I know there's a slight discrepancy if you're learning the licks on my course. You don't know what they're supposed to sound like other than my demos, and I'm not a blues master. So, listening to the originals, to the blues greats, is how you will hear those phrases and learn how to do them. And a bit of transcribing, learning a set solo by somebody like Eric Clapton or Freddy King, Albert King, whoever you happen to like, but learning a set solo, listening to it over and over again and trying to get your playing as close to that as you can, it's a really good idea.

If you need a lick, I recommend starting with a single lick and then really trying to make that lick sound great. If you're going to learn a word, the word you probably learn if I was going anywhere in the world and I wanted to learn the language would be "thank you." So, I'd practice at home, "Merci, how do I say that? Merci, Merci, trying to do Merci beaucoup." Oh, I've got an extended little new bit. I'd practice doing that repeatedly, and then I'd use it when I went to a shop, and people would understand what I was doing, and I'd communicate with that one word. Having one word you can remember to say and pronounce correctly is much more useful than having 50 words you can't remember, which you have to keep going to the guidebook for. So, if you're doing a blues solo at the local blues jam Club, you don't want to have a sheet of paper with all your licks on it. It would be best if you had them in your head. You want to have a few licks to use and play well.

If I saw somebody playing like that in a club, I'd be way happier than hearing somebody using that low root note playing up the scale. It just doesn't work. Record yourself if you think you might be guilty of doing this. Specifically, say, "Okay, I will do what I normally do. I'm not going to try and focus on licks. I'm just going to muck around with a scale." Do it and record yourself. Then, learn one lick and practice doing that lick. Playing that one lick for five minutes, like a whole backing track, would be too much, and you'd get bored, and the audience would get bored. But you should be able to make a fairly cool musical statement for a chorus or two, and you'll learn a lot about it.

But you'll notice I'm not just playing the lick straight. I'm mucking around with it. This is where the analogy comes apart a little bit. When we're learning English or any other language, there are ways of conjugating the verb or whatever, so we might have "run" or "ran" or "running," you've got these variations of the word. But with the blues language and vocabulary, you can muck around with them more than with normal English vocabulary. So, the analogy falls apart a bit. I'm sorry, but the idea is really solid. Take one lick you know well and keep exploring it until you can make music out of it. Then, learn another lick and practice doing the first one and that second lick. Just the two licks. See if you can make a musical sentence with just these two words. Again, the analogy is falling apart, but you should be able to do it. Using blues vocabulary, you should be able to use a few words to make up new phrases. After you've got a pool of vocabulary, about 10 words, it doesn't matter where on the neck. Once you've got a few words, you'll find incorporating new words easier because you already have a foundation to build on. So, again, I'm going to use my embarrassingly bad French, but you might learn "Je voudrais…", "I would like...". So, you would learn new things like "Je voudrais un croissant" or "Je voudrais un café." You would learn a little phrase, and you'd learn new words that you could tag on the end, and that's the way that you would gradually build up your vocabulary because you're connecting new words that you've just learned with things that you already knew.

As I said, in the course, I teach on Essential Blues Guitar, we do five licks in each pattern, but the pattern and this idea of learning the five patterns of scales have limited use. It's a good finger exercise, and it can be helpful to understand where the notes in the lick fit into the scale. But the more you play, the more you'll find notes that don't even fit the minor pentatonic scale. So, if you start thinking too much about the scale and the notes in the scale, you'll be like, "Well, I can't play that one because it's got a note that I don't understand." So, you could choose to go, "Well, I just don't understand it," or you could go, "Well, this one, I like the lick. I connect with that lick. I want to work on it. I'm going to practice that lick." So then you need to use your ears to go, "When does this lick sound good?" Because a particular lick sounds great on the A7 core, but it sounds terrible over the D. So there gets to be this point where some of the licks work well over some chords and not others.

There are theory reasons for why that works, but there are also ear reasons why that doesn't work. And if you do something and it doesn't sound good, you just don't do it again. It's quick to learn it that way rather than trying to think, "Well, that's the note C Sharp. The C Sharp is the third in the key of A, but it's the Major Seventh in the key of D, and we're playing a D7 chord, which has a flat seven." There's maths there. You can learn the maths if you want, but it's not something that I think many of the Blues Masters were that aware of. They just knew that this sound, this word, sounded really good in this spot, but it didn't sound very good in that other spot.

So, with the lick thing, there are some important things to remember when practicing your licks. The most important part of learning the lick is that you're programming your musical imagination. That's what's happening. You got to learn your fingers, and maybe you're working on your string bending, the guitar gymnastics part. Like, can you physically do the lick? But at the same time, you're programming your musical imagination. And that's important because the thing with language is that you know that you speak it fluently when you don't think about it, right?

I wouldn't say that I could speak French because I have to think about things before I say them. Before I go into the shop, I have to think: what will I ask for? How do I say that? I might have a quick look at my book. So I wouldn't say that I could speak it. But if I got to the point where I could speak it without thinking about it, then I'd be like, yeah, I can speak French. And I can confidently speak Blues because I don't think about it. I don't know what I'm going to do before it happens. It just comes out.

There's a fantastic little Pat Metheny clip doing the rounds on social media where he says that he doesn't even know what's going on when he's playing at his best. He's not even aware of it. And that is the end goal, right? It's not to be thinking about licks or phrases or playing in this position or that position or how they link together or anything like that. The music's on, and your musical imagination has an idea of something that would sound great in the context in which it finds itself. When the drums are playing this, the singer's doing that, and the bass is doing that, your imagination says, "Oh, this might sound nice." And your fingers can make that thing happen. That's the end goal. But that goal is very far away if you're still thinking of trying to learn your licks or you haven't learned your licks yet. You got to practice the licks over and over and over again until it just happens naturally.

Many people expect to play with feel and play from the heart or whatever immediately, or they're worried that they can't do it, but they've only been playing for a few years. I didn't get to the point where I wasn't thinking about what I was doing for a long time, 10 years probably before that started to become a thing for me where I didn't have to think about what I was playing. It would just happen of its own accord. It takes a lot of repetition. So if that's not happening for you yet, don't feel like, "Oh God, I must be a terrible guitar player," or "Maybe I'm not natural," which is one of the things that I hear all the time. You almost certainly are. You just haven't practiced it enough yet.

On my Brazilian jiu-jitsu journey, I know one of the things that I have to do at the moment is repeat things repeatedly. I must drill the moves to become instinctive because I still have to think about them now. I must go, "Oh God, I'm in mount position. How do I get out of mount? Okay, I will stand on his feet and do this." There's so much thinking about it, and it's so slow that the moment's gone already. I have to practice that much more over and over again. And that's the thing. If I'm rolling against a black belt person, they've done all that practice and know instinctively what to do. They go, "Well, it's going to go here or here, and this is how you do it," and they can do it. It flows.

That flow state only comes through practice. So, one of the key things, if you hadn't realized it already, you got to practice this stuff. Learning licks is the key thing, but you've got to practice the licks. You got to practice soloing with them. You have to practice improvising with them. You have to practice moving from one lick to another lick. You have to practice threading them, phrasing, and dynamics. There are many little things to consider, but it all starts with the licks, right?

One more thing, you are what you practice. So when thinking about learning your vocabulary, try not to learn things you don't like, even if you feel like you should, because the ones you don't like will never come out in your playing. You won't connect with them deeply, and it's a waste of time. You're much better off finding the licks you connect with so that you like the sound of what you're playing when you play. That's an important bit of the puzzle as well. Sure, some of it's language-based, and again, the analogy is getting a bit sketchy, but you want to think every time you're learning a lick, "Do I love this lick? Could I imagine myself playing it? If I play it, would I be happy to listen to somebody playing this lick? Would that be cool?"

It's more a jazz thing for me than a blues thing, but I deliberately tried to learn little Bop phrases from Charlie Parker. That's not the kind of jazz that gets me excited. I'm much more into Joe Pass, who uses Bop lines. But I did lots of study on the very strict Charlie Parker things, which was futile. Those kind of lines never came out for me. George Benson is a guitar player that I love. I love the sound of his licks, but none of the stuff that I learned of his, and I spent hours and hours and hours learning his licks, ever come out. And I don't understand why, but they don't. So, just be aware that the things you're going to learn will be the things that come out of you when you improvise. So choose them carefully. Think about the things you will learn before you learn them.

Can scales be licks? This was a question from Damien Jones. He said, "How can you turn a scale into licks and phrases that sound like music rather than sections of a scale?" And the answer is, licks definitely. So, learn licks. That's much better than learning scales. But you will sometimes find licks that sound scale-like. One of my favorite ones I use all the time is one of my pet ones that I berate myself for using when I play it. It's a phrase I don't use often, but I like it. It's a descending number game, very much like a scale. However, you don't often hear the straight scale. Occasionally, you might hear something like it, but it's pretty lazy. It doesn't add much to the music because it sounds like someone playing a scale, which isn't very exciting.

Next on my list are techniques, bends, and vibrato. Craig Bruce Spacey mentioned that he's struggling to bend on string one but is okay on two and three. This is likely a technique issue. Using your fingers to push up like that is easier on strings two and three and nearly impossible on string one. I recommend checking some of my string bending videos to ensure you use your whole arm and hand to make those string bends in an "L" shape.

Getting bends in tune is a big deal. Tony Browns specifically asked how to know when a bend is in tune. When practicing bends, I recommend playing the note you're bending from, the note you're bending to, and then bending from the first to the second. This could be one fret, two frets, or three frets if you want to get into doing really big bends. You can use unison bends, playing an E and bending a D to an E. You do it together, and eventually, it becomes the same note.

I have experimented with using a guitar tuner before, bending and trying to make it go in tune. I've always preferred to do it by ear because it makes more sense. The danger with a tuner is that you might overbend and then drop down, which sounds wonky. I use my ear, but you could use a tuner as well.

Phil Jones asked for some hints on "how to do the speedy blues bursts that some players do. These bursts are so fast that they're free-form in timing but cleverly managed to end on a beat." It's all about ending on the beat. It sounds wonky if you do a big phrase that's out of time or a bit loose, and then you finish out of time. So, you want to think about your finishing phase. You want the last note to be on the beat, even if the other parts are loose. The last note is what I'm targeting; I'm not paying much attention to the rest of it.

It's also about having specific phrases that you can use. Both the examples I was playing with have an element of timing involved. Some don't, but more commonly than not, it would be a specific subdivision or phrase. In that instance, it will be learning the fast lick, practicing it slowly, and then gradually developing the speed until you can play it at the tempo you want. Speed guitar has never been my thing; I'm not very good at playing fast, but I know how to do it.

The last question is this one, which Bill Bailey asked: "How do you play with emotion, forget the moment, and let it happen?" This is the crux of the thing about Blues. People say, "Oh, it's got more feel than other sorts of music," I don't believe that to be true. I think technical music can have just as much emotion attached to it because people can express themselves in many different ways, the same as in art. People can express themselves by doing very simple line drawings, or they can express themselves by doing very complicated drawings, very real drawings, or very abstract drawings. There are lots of different styles of Art, and it's not that one is any more valid than the other one. So, to nip that in the bud before people say Blues has more feel because they play fewer notes. I don't think that's true. I think that you can be equally expressive in any music.

But the thing with the blues is absorbing the language enough that you don't have to think about it anymore, and then it just happens. And that is where you feel like you're expressing yourself, where you're just not aware of what's going on anymore. That's the point; that's the aim. Not when I'm teaching. Usually, if I'm trying to demonstrate something or do a little demo, it's very hard for me to get lost in the music in this environment. But when I'm doing records with We Came of Strangers, when it's time to overdub solos, I try not to think about anything. I try to wash over the music and let it happen.

That is something that you can practice. You can practice just trying not to think. It's tricky. It would be best if you had done the groundwork. You need to have done the practice, and you need to have learned the language to the point where some of it will happen by itself. But you can also practice and go right, "I'm just going to try and let it go with this little group of phrases, or whatever, that I know. I'm not thinking about them anymore, but I'm just going to see what happens when I try to let go of it." The more you practice allowing yourself to get into that flow state, the easier it becomes. It's unlikely to happen by itself.

Okay, the one thing that I had on here, which I'm saving for another day because people who would want to know this information probably knew most of what I was talking about anyway, and that will be making the chord changes. How do you target specific notes? How do you outline the chords in the key using triads and arpeggios and that kind of thing? So, that will be a conversation for another one of these sessions.

Richard, anything interesting in the Q&A box?
Two technique things have come in, both related to bending. People are asking, how do you mute the strings when you're doing a bend? They're talking about the thicker strings and the strings ringing out. And related to that, how do you stop your fingers from going underneath the strings when you're pushing or bending?

Both are good questions. You need to pay attention to the muting, especially on an electric guitar, when you start using some gain. You may not have noticed, but I'm always fiddling with the volume. Whenever I'm not playing, I nip it straight down to zero. It's just a force of habit. But when you're doing anything on the thinner strings, you want the outside part of your hand under your pinky to sit on all the thicker strings. The general rule, which works nearly all the time, is that if I'm playing a note on the third string, this part of my hand is in charge of muting all of the strings above it, the thicker strings, and the underneath of that finger and the first finger is in control of muting all of the strings underneath it, or the thinner strings. So if I'm doing a bend, the underneath of the left hand is muting those. It depends a little bit on finger shape and string thickness; many variables come into play with where the strings go when you bend.

This relates to the second question about the strings going on top of the fingers. When some people bend, I've seen strings go over the fingers. That shouldn't be the case, and that usually means the fingers are too round. I'm almost certain that I cover this in the string bending lessons on my site. If I didn't, please drop an email to hello@justinguitar.com and flag it for me, and I'll see if I can ensure that it's covered in the new blues courses. But the strings should never be up over the fingernail, ever. So you need to think about finger position and explore exactly what position you put your fingers on the strings to ensure that doesn't happen. For most people, that doesn't happen, and I can't think off the top of my head why that would cause that either. I'd need to watch somebody do it again to remind myself of the cause. But it will be down to you to experiment with that to ensure it doesn't go over. One thing worth practicing is trying to play things where you hit more of the strings than the ones you're playing as an exercise.

So, if I only use my left hand, I'm using the underneath of the first finger to mute all the thinner strings and the tips of the fingers to cover the sixth string. Now, when I move on to the fourth string, the thumb has to come over to get involved. Now I'm also using that second finger hanging around, so you can hear it a bit now. I'm not suggesting that you would always hit them all in that way, but it's a good exercise to see how well your string muting is going. Now, as soon as I get onto those thinner strings, I have to use those middle two fingers, and it's pretty ropey. I haven't done this exercise for ages using just that, and to be honest, I rarely play on the thinner string when I'm doing this kind of style. I should practice it because it's quite a cool thing to do.

The idea of doing that sort of thing is being able to play those lines from Can't Stop by the Chili Peppers or anything where you're strumming all the strings and letting some of the notes out. So that's a good exercise. I've got a couple of lessons on string muting. There's one that explains this palm covering the thicker strings and the underneath of the finger covering the thinner strings. That's something I've covered a whole lot.

This video will also be available on the website if you want to go and check it out later. We'll also send you a little survey asking you for feedback about how I could improve these things because this is the beginning of this live journey. So, your feedback and constructive criticism is very welcome.

Thank You!

A big thanks to Richard and Laryne, part of my team who are helping me make these things work and happen for you. Thank you for coming. I appreciate your interest, and I hope you enjoyed it.

When you do the feedback form, I am working on a pretty awesome new course for next year. If you've got any extra feedback about things missing on the website to do with blues that you'd like to see. So, if you're interested in getting into that, any feedback about things you've wanted to learn on Blues stuff that you haven't seen on the website, let me know.

And with that, I'm going to say goodbye. Thank you very much. I appreciate it, and have yourself a fantastic evening or day if you happen to be watching this later. So, thank you very much, have a fantastic evening, bye-bye.

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