I’ve been working on updating this series of GT tutorials on spicing up blues licks.  The central idea is to use the minor pentatonic boxes we know and love as guitarists, but to target chord tones.  This means that you can use those familiar pentatonic boxes as a visual reference, but to add spice by targeting major chord tones from the dominant seventh chords in the standard 12 bar blues changes.

This works well because it’s one of the reasons “blues” sounds like it does: the use of minor notes in a primarily major harmonic context.  So, in order to make our blues sound better, we should incorporate major notes into the minor scales when we play melodic lines!

Notice that if you play the major third of the A major chord along with the A minor pentatonic scale, then you immediately get an distinctly “bluesy” sound.

GT recently made some of the lessons in this first tutorial free to view!

https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=217

Here’s a demo of the play along!  Enjoy!