Guitar: B Blues Over the Changes

Where B Blues lies at this seat, and what a chorus takes out of it.

B Blues runs 6 notes to the octave, laid out here on EADGBE with every B flagged. Mid-chorus the pattern is not what you need; where the root is when the chord changes underneath you is.

The minor pentatonic with a b5 "blue note" wedged in — that one extra note adds grit, tension, and a sly, vocal quality. Tough, expressive, and unmistakably bluesy.

Heard in: Blues, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, and boogie-woogie — Delta and Chicago blues, Hendrix, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

A guitar chorus is a single line with the comp dropped, so a scale here is what the picking hand walks through between the two or three phrases it actually meant to play.

Play it slowly against the audio until it stops being a shape, then put it over two bars of a form and let the chord tones decide which of the notes you actually keep.