British Blues Rock

Today's lick is a swinging blues-rock turnaround figure.  This is a telling example of the transplanting of Texas and Chicago blues guitar clich,s into the high-energy British rock arena.  Players such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Peter Green and Mick Taylor, all admirers of American blues icons, regularly "borrowed" their familiar melodies and supercharged them with the hot new Les Paul-Marshall tone developed in England.  This lick is in E, is played with a shuffle feel, and works against the final two measures of a 12-bar blues, known as the turnaround.  Note the use of the E minor pentatonic scale (E-G-A-B-D) augmented by the major third G sharp and the blue note B flat.  Note also the variety of pitch bends.  This lick contains quarter-step, half-step and whole-step pitch bends.  The final five-note melody is a familiar blues line which exploits the E major arpeggio (G#-E-B) in a particular configuration often heard in American blues phrases.

Learn this lick and then practice to