5 blues licks for beginners

If you’re a beginner blues player then there’s no doubt that you’ll need to start building up your collection of awesome licks. Think of licks as the vocabulary you need to start piecing together full blues sentences (phrases) to use in your soloing. The more great licks you can absorb into your playing, the more chance you have of pinning together a great solo!

In this blog we’re here to show you 5 licks to get you started, all based around the major and minor pentatonics in the key of C Blues. With each lick we’ll do a brief explanation of what’s going on, and also provide the scale shapes to help!

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The lesson

Now, with that all said and done, let’s get back to the lesson shall we! Here is the video for you to watch to check out the 5 licks and the detailed discussion behind each one. You can find the backing tracks right here too.

The solo & tab

So let’s start by working through the tab! This is all in the key of C blues, and is working with the C major pentatonic and C minor pentatonic scales (which we’ll talk about in more detail in a second). If you would like to download the GP file for this blues track, you can do so here. Otherwise here is the main tab for you:

The scales

As for the scales that we are using, it’s all about the major and minor crossover in the blues. This means that thanks to the dominant 7th chords, that include both the minor 7th and major 3rd, we are able to use both the major and minor pentatonic over the top. This is the basic rule, but I can understand if that explanation feels a bit wishy washy initially! If you’d like a more detailed explanation, check out this blog post.

At this level, I would suggest gaining experience playing the licks, listening to the licks absorbing the licks over trying to get too deep with the theory. As you learn to play with these sounds more, the theory will become easier to absorb. So, with that in mind, here are the scale shapes:

You wouldn’t necessarily learn the final crossover scale as a whole thing of course! It’s just a visualisation of it all together. You’ll see in the video that I explain what is happening within each lick to achieve a crossover at points, and when you do and don’t need to do it! It can be pretty subtle most of the time. Do check out the video for more on this!

The rhythm part

If you want a 360 degree view of this track we’re learning, you might also be interested in learning the rhythm part. This is the part that is happening underneath the main solo, and provides a great example of how you might like to play through a 12 bar blues. Let’s first start by detailing the chord changes. These are: C7 | F7 | C7 | C7 | F7 | F7 | C7 | C7 | G7 | F7 | C7 | G7. So it’s a standard 12 bar blues structure! We are, however, using 9th chords for the 4 and 5 chord, so this ends up looking like this: C7 | F9 | C7 | C7 | F9 | F9 | C7 | C7 | G9 | F9 | C7 | G9. The 9th chord is simply an extension of the dominant 7th, adding the 9th degree of the sale to the top of the chord. For more information on the theory behind chord construction, check this out.

Let’s take a look at this chord part via the tab. Remember that you can download the Guitar Pro version here as well if you would like to see it in action! Here is the tab:

The turnaround

Finally, if you’re loving the turnaround at the end of this track we have a great detailed post about blues turnarounds right here. This turnaround and many more are covered in that blog post and accompanying video, as we don’t really discuss that part of it in this video!

Guitar Club

Hopefully you loved this post and learnt a lot from it! Just a quick reminder then that we have partnered together with the amazing team here at Guitar Pro to bring all GP customers a 1 month access for zero cost. You don’t even need your credit card! Click here to sign up with just your email, get your pathway, and start learning!