During the course of soloing, I sometimes get to recall some kind of motifs or rhythmic pattens which I’ve once listened to on the famous player’s tunes. To stir up the final part of my solo, I come to rely on kind of famous ones.
Before dive into this topic, I guess I’m always ignoring about the essence of those riffs or patterns. It easy to guess those would come from rhythmic patterns. But I basally rely on my faint memories and mere sense of my ear habit. So it would be helpful to take some time on this topic.
Here I picked up 3 patterns seen in Blue Monk, and The Thumb.
Here comes the theme from Blue Monk. The first half of a bar comes a piece of theme melody. Those notes are made of 8th and are moving half step upward to 5th of the chord. And I put an accompanying chord on upbeat of three. You can create your parts of solo by applying this pattern to another shape of melodies.
The 2nd example here is from Wes’s blues tune The Thumb. Its original key is G. But I transferred it into Bb and then put accompanying chord at upbeat of 2. Wes goes this motif during the 1st chorus of the tune. Wes goes back and forth between major and minor 3rd alternatively within the melody parts. That brings naturally more of a blues feel. Melody parts are made of simple 3 notes staring on beat 4.
The last one is also from The Thumb. And the melody shape is slightly different. Accompanying chord puling ahead of the original bar anticipating the following melody.
In addition to above, I’m going to put another examples. These are written in the key of F blues.
1. Call and response
2. Call and Response variation
It’s important to notice that consecutive 8th notes are played in triplets. He uses ghost up stroke.
3. Simple one
That’s the this weeks practice pattern. I would like to doodle several blues tunes and standards with this idea and upload those on my channel.