One String Blues Scale Fun
Learn a cool riff using pull offs and the blues scale
E Blues Scale
To the right is an E blues scale on the staff. Don't worry about reading music, the beat by beat breakdown will have you learning a very cool riff using this scale and pull offs in no time!
The notes above are: E, G , A, Bb, B, D and E
The fretboard to the right shows the notes from an E blues scale on our high E string!
A blues scale is a minor pentatonic scale with an extra note called the flat 5th. For an E blues scale it is a Bb.
There are many benefits to learning scales on one string. The relationships made between what we see and hear are very important. As notes move up the fretboard we can see and hear the difference between half steps and whole steps and in the case of the blues scale a minor 3rd (3 half step interval).
Playing scales on one string is not the most efficient way to play a scale but it is great for your ear and learning the fretboard. The paid members section has plenty of one string scales and a complete method for learning how to use 5 scale positions to learn your entire fretboard. Upgrade you membership here!
The Riff 🙂
The Video (disclaimer lol , this is old old old) 🙂
I'm embarrassed to put this video on the page but I have to because this was the very first video I put on YouTube almost 10 years ago (It was uploaded April 18th, 2007). Wild! Since then the channel has had over 26 million views. I had no idea what I was doing then. Haha. Anyway, I will redo it. I have this idea that I will redo every video from 10 years ago on the 10 year anniversary of that video. Sounds like a fun challenge for myself 🙂
The Breakdown
Let's get started. Beat one starts with playing the G on your 3rd fret of your high E string (1st string) and then pulling off to the open E.
Start by down picking the G on the 3rd fret. Then pull off to open E. When you pull off to open E you pull the finger off the fret to hear the open E. You may have to experiment with it a bit to get a nice clean sound. The new video I make will explore this.
After the pull off we will down and then up pick the open E. Note that the pull off is in the place where we would normally up pick. This pick pattern is the key to being able to play this whole riff fast so spend some time just on one beat getting a grip on this 4 notes pattern.
Now we will follow the same pull off and pick pattern from beat 1 but moving up the string. Beat 2 has us playing A on the 5th fret, then Bb on the 6th and lastly B on the 7th fret!
To finish this 2 measure riff we will play D on the 10th fret and then pull off to open E like we did previously. This time we will do that on both beat 1 and beat 2 then on to our 12th fret for high E (one octave higher then our open E). We will play that twice also for beat 3 and beat 4!
To the right is the background guitar part from the audio above. It is played in drop D tuning. I will do a break down of this at some point if anyone is interested in learning it.
