blues challenge

Got a blues scale under your fingers? Hip to the 12 bar blues form? Want to take the blues challenge? Can you create a tempo and pulse by tapping your foot on the 2nd and 4th beats in 4 / 4 time? Then while tapping your foot play blues lines within the 12 bar form over your groove? Easy enough eh? What chord changes are you outlining in your lines? Can you clearly hear these chords in the melodic lines you are creating? If so, cool, for this "hearing the changes within the form" is the basic premise of this blues challenge. So, if the above format is cool, under your foot and fingers so to speak, how many of the 12 major or 12 minor blues keys can you recreate this format in?

If your initial chord changes were the One, Four and Five chords, do you have any ways to substitute in other chords? Can you recreate the challenge using these substitute chords? Can you modulate these changes to other keys? How many? Major and minor tonalities?

What was your original tempo? Slow, medium, fast? Can you increase your tempo and still keep the foot tapping and hear the chord changes you've chosen in your lines? How many choruses back to back?

Did you climax your solo by using a vamp line, perhaps a call and response idea, maybe just rhythmically leaning on one pitch?

Well, got all that? Quite a few ideas to shed in just a few lines eh? In the challenge, one has to juggle all of the music to make it work huh? Doing these kinds of musical exercises can make a player more appreciative of their rhythm sections! That's potentially all part of the blues challenge. The first part of the challenge as outlined above comes from a workshop created by the late Emily Remler, an exciting bebop jazz guitarist whose recorded music still shines as bright as Emily did while she graced us with her joyous presence. Ms. Remler's idea is to simply get a foot tapping on two and four, and create melodic lines for consecutive chorus of twelve bar blues, gradually increasing the complexity of the harmony and bumping up the tempo as her chops and imagination allowed on any given day.

The second part of this page is a link to a chart of chord substitutions for the twelve bar blues form, which gradually becomes more and more complex harmonically, thus melodically as we move through the choruses.

Why would we want to do this? Well for a number of reasons, all of which strengthen key aspects of our musical prowess.

One key benefit of this challenge strengthens a players ability to gradually link more and more choruses together, building longer solos. Understanding and mastering the turnaround, the link point between each successive chorus, allows stronger players to stretch out, potentially telling more involved stories with stronger climaxes. their ideas.

Another benefit of this challenge is developing the ability to clearly hear the chord changes in the line without the chords actually being sounded behind the line. Perhaps remembering that by arpeggiating the chord, we get a pretty clear aural picture of the harmonic colors chosen, and quite a challenge in the brighter tempos.

The cool thing about this exercise is that it forces us to juggle all of the pieces of the musical puzzle in real time by ourselves. It allows us to create different grooves and to make sure our lines swing, you can hear and feel it by the bare bones nature of the exercise. The exercise also insists that the 12 bar blues cycle is solidly locked in and the ever elusive turnaround and downbeat at the top of the new chorus unmistakable in our mind's ear. We do all this in real time, setting the tempo as our abilities allow, gradually increasing the challenge by simply increasing the tempo. The idea is that if we can do this unaccompanied, then when jamming with other players it just becomes that much easier, due to our own inner artistic strengths. With a mastering of this blues challenge we also emerge as stronger, more confident musical leaders, something which we never seem to have enough of anymore. This exercise is also a great way to learn new tunes, warm up etc., whether for a gig, before rehearsal or checking out a new ax at a friends or the music store. A few things to perhaps keep in mind...

The following musical example of 12 bar blues choruses below are included here for the beginning learner to take the blues challenge. The first of the following five choruses starts with basically just the roots of the chords and a blue note passing tone or two, and gradually increases in complexity up from there. Perhaps jam along with the sound at first but do try to develop the ability to eventually:

1)  Pick a tempo. Pick a tune or simply create one or just play the blues.

2)  Count it off, get a foot tapping on 2 and 4.

3)  Try to create and articulate a melodic line for at least one, then two full choruses of 12 bar blues back to back without stopping. Cool?

So, could ya get through a chorus or two? Easy one eh? Can you clearly hear the chords in your line? Is that important to your sound? Ready for some additional chord substitutions? That's the advancing part of the challenge, that we can still hear the chords in our melodic lines as we sub out and create a more complex set of 12 bar blues changes. Here are the links to advance the harmony a bit.

4) As one gains strength in this exercise, extend your solo to include a gradual building of tension, musical climax and return to your original theme. This extended format simply follows what usually happens on the bandstand.

5) Begin a list of blues heads that you know and ones to be learned, and run them through the above format. Click on blues tunes for suggested jazz titles.

Here's the music to help begin the challenge. Example 1.

New to the blues? For those that are, two of the following links contains a look at the basic 12 bar blues in either the major or minor tonality. This potentially provides a basis to move into the chord substitution possibilities, all of the choruses of which are based on the 12 blues form. In these links to the chord substitutions, there is a basic chorus or two to get started, then the substitute harmony ideas begin to gradually enter the form, expanding the harmonic possibilities. Remember perhaps, that when all else fails, accurately arpeggiating the harmony can clear things up in a hurry. Along these lines, these sub charts just might be cool instructional guides for practicing arpeggios.

The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. William James