We kick off our SRV course with a fast paced, no nonsense Texas style solo! We root ourselves firmly in the key of E blues and work on developing speed, Texas licks and rhythm within your soloing.
The Stevie Ray Vaughan style solo will improve your speed and rhythm within your lead playing, but we will need to start very slow! The whole solo really epitomises Stevie Ray Vaughan's ability to just keep playing! It was Clapton who said that of all the players he's ever seen, it's only been Stevie Ray Vaughan that never seems to run out of ideas... and it's so true! So, watch the full solo a few times, try to get the melody in your head, and then move onto the next video.
During the first two licks, we set the scene by putting ourselves in the key of E blues. Blues keys incorporate elements of major and minor, and the first lick is a great example of that. We kick off in the E minor pentatonic shape 2, and then work back to shape 1, also including the major 3rd from the E major chord. If you would like to know more about 'blues keys' then check out our Genre Study course on blues! When we move up to lick 2 then we move into pentatonic shape 5.
Stevie Ray Vaughan is the master of taking one position of a scale shape and getting the absolute most out of it. For these two licks, we take the E minor pentatonic shape 1 (plus blues note), as well as the E major pentatonic shape 2. The combination of these two gives us our E blues key and allows Stevie Ray Vaughan to create some impressive sounds! The scale shapes can be found in the fretboard diagrams.
Lick 5 is the typical Stevie Ray Vaughan lick that you will have heard on so many of his solos! It is again using the scales defined in the last lesson, but adding in this extra 'out' note - the 13th fret of the high E string. They are called 'out notes' because they are outside the normal scale and typically only used for a fraction of a second before coming back into the scale and therefore resolving the sound. The out note can be found in the fretboard diagram.
When playing in E (or E flat, as Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar was typically tuned down half a step), we can take advantage of the open strings underneath pentatonic shape 1. Once again these last two licks use shape 1 and 2, just as the opening lick did, and crucially you need to hit the turnaround at the right time. In a Texas blues like this, the turnaround is usually a lick followed by a chromatic run towards the 5 chords. In this case, we have the chromatic run from the open A string to the 2nd fret, highlighting the B!
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