Minor Blues Boot Camp
BY COREY CHRISTIANSEN
Corey Christiansen, a former senior editor
and guitar clinician for Mel Bay Publications,
is known for his fluid jazz improvisation and
instructional chops. He teaches full-time at Utah
State University and is an Artist-in-Residence
at the Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington,
Indiana, the Atlanta Institute of Music, and the
Broadway Music School. To learn more about
his CDs and DVD, and see his current workshop
and performance schedule, visit coreychristian-
sen.com. Photo by Jimmy Katz
CHOPS: Intermediate
THEORY: Intermediate
LESSON OVERVIEW:
• Learn the principles of
backcycling.
• Develop more interesting blues
progressions.
• Create embellished chord
voicings using proper
voice-leading.
I won’t get into it here, but understand
that you can embellish all the chords in a
blues. This also allows us to choose from an
arsenal of voicings that will take our playing
and sound to the next level. A quick-and-dirty way to implement this right away
is to add the 7th to each chord, therefore
turning a Gm into a Gm7 and a Cm into a
Cm7. Easy, right?
The next technique we will discuss is
called backcycling. This concept could
merit several articles on its own, but at the
moment we don’t have the space for an in-depth study of the theory. Here is a quick
overview: Any chord can be preceded by
its dominant chord or the corresponding
IIm-V7 chord. For example, in the key of C
we can put either a G7 (the dominant) or a
Dm7-G7 (the IIm–V7) in front of the C.
These chords can also be called secondary dominants. If you have an Am7 or an
Am7
5, you can change either one to an
A7 to create a stronger V–I motion. If you
have a vamp in G minor you can put some
form of D7 before any Gm chord to create
some interesting harmonic motion. These
techniques can be used to create both
interesting comping and great arrangements. Fig. 2 shows a blues progression
with some backcycling ideas and a few
pretty simple embellishments.
Another option is to use a tritone substitution in place of the secondary dominant.
A tritone is an interval of an augmented
fourth or a diminished fifth. To quickly
find the tritone sub for a chord, simply
build a dominant chord with the root a tritone away. For D7, the sub would be A
7.
Fig. 1 Fig. 1
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CLICK HERE to hear
sound clips of
these examples.
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In its most basic form, a minor blues can sound quite vanilla. In this lesson, we’re
going to look at several simple techniques
you can use to create more tension and
interest in your comping. Let’s dig in with a
basic progression shown in Fig. 1. This is in
the key of G minor and uses a I–IV–I–V–I
pattern. We will go over four different techniques to beef up this progression and turn
it into something more original.
The first option is adding embellishments to each chord. In previous lessons
we have talked about adding 7ths, 9ths,
11ths, and 13ths to each chord, as well
as altering the 5th and 9th on dominant
chords. If you need a refresher, check out
“Liberating Blues Changes” in the January
2012 issue of PG.
Fig. 2
G‹ 7
Fig. 2
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