Blues Scale in A

Hello and welcome back I'm Joseph Hoffman, and today we're going to learn how to play a new kind of scale.
The blues scale is used in a style of music called the blues.
A musical style that originated in the deep south of the United States
in places like Louisiana and Mississippi in the early 1900s.
The blues have a deeply emotional, soulful sound
and tend to focus on singing about your troubles or heartaches.
Blues went on to influence the development of other musical styles like jazz and rock,
and you can still hear the blues scale being used in music today across multiple popular styles.
Let's come to the piano to check out the blues scale.
In the key of A, here's what the blues scale sounds like:
Of course in blues or jazz we would most often swing the eighth notes.
So you get a sound like that.
Here are the notes so you can see them a little better.
The blues scale is built on a scale called the pentatonic scale,
which you'll notice has all whole steps, and then also these thirds. No half steps,
but then with blues there are certain notes called 'blue notes', like this
D-sharp or E-flat
and that adds an extra
cool sound that gives blues its very unique sound.
So again, this is blues in the key of A,
and here's the fingering that I recommend. There are different fingerings that are possible, but if you're playing this with the right hand,
I would go 1 2, notice we just skip over the B, so we go up a third.
So the fingering is 1 2 3 4 on that D-sharp then finger 1 is going to come under to E,
and then again finger 2
is going to skip over F to bring us up to G, and then we make it to A. So 1 2 3 4 1 2 3, and then we can come back down.
Then often in blues we can go a whole step below our tonic.
So what I'd like you to do is press pause and try out the A blues scale.
Go up the octave, and then come back down the octave, and then let's add in that step below
as well by bringing finger 2 over for just a little cross over there.
Press pause try out that scale, and then press play to go on.
The cool thing about the blues scale is pretty much any note you play sounds kind of jazzy or bluesy.
And so now let me show you how you can just mess around a little bit.
One thing that's common in blues is to use this blue note, this
D-sharp or E-flat. In fact, sometimes jazz pianists will even kind of play with say your finger 3 and then glide that finger right down
like this, or up
and that's kind of idiomatic or common in the language of blues and jazz.
So you can either use two fingers 4 3 like that, or just hit it and slide off.
It sounds pretty cool, huh? And you can go up from that blue note as well.
So, what I'd like you to do is press pause again and just kind of experiment with some different notes.
Again, rather than, you know, playing a random string of notes, choose like two or three to experiment with. Blues and jazz is often made up of very simple repeating patterns.
You can just stick on one note.
So you're just staying in an area of a few notes, you can make all kinds of interesting patterns.
Okay, so just try out some different combinations of notes and see what you like.
That's kind of making up your own licks.
Okay, press pause and just experiment messing around in the A blue scale, then press play to go on.
Now one other thing about improvising in the blues again using short ideas can be really positive.
You know, rather than thinking in long run-on sentences
You know, where you can't get any meaning out of the notes, think in little phrases or ideas, you know, maybe two notes,
and then you know two repeated notes,
and then you can repeat that again.
Then you might vary it.
So again, don't be afraid to do really short ideas, repeat those ideas, and then elaborate on them.
Now, let's improvise in A blues.
I'm going to do kind of a common blues pattern in the left hand by playing this V,
and then going up to a major VI like this. And I'll add some chords in the right hand.
So I'll provide an accompaniment, and then I would like you to improvise using the A blues scale.
Okay, so again, any note you can play, I mean, any note in the A blues scale is going to sound good.
So listen,
try and stick with the rhythm of the accompaniment I'm providing, and play off of that rhythm, and just see what happens.
Okay, have some fun improvising. Here we go in A blues.
1 2 3 4
Nice, now feel free to rewind and try that improvisation as many times as you'd like until you find some sounds that you're really happy with.
Let me show you one other way that you can improvise using the A blues scale.
I was playing in the key of A. The A blues scale actually also sounds really good in the key of C major.
So if I'm playing, let's say the chords, or the chord progression from our "Heart and Soul ...