Musical vocabulary is a funny thing. It’s often driven by ergonomics of the instrument - efficiency & comfort. This is the reason that so many guitarists are comfortable in ‘position 1’ of the Min Pentatonic scale yet not comfortable ‘position 5’ of the Min Pentatonic scale for instance.

‘Position 1’ lends itself much more readily to the ergonomics of our fretting hand and this is reflected in its ubiquitous use.

So why am I going on about all this? Well, recently I’ve been brushing up on my piano playing and have been learning a lot of blues licks. What I’ve noticed is that blues piano vocabulary makes extensive use of double stops. It would never have occurred to me to play some of these double stops on the guitar even in the instances where they are perfectly ‘playable’. Below is one such example presented in two different ways.

These licks are essentially descending minor blues scales. The scale is represented in the lower notes of the double stops with the higher notes representing a bluesy harmonisation of the scale.

You can see the intervals below. The circles delineate the minor blues scale and the squares illustrate the harmonisations - the 6th is especially cool.

Here’s the first iteration of the lick, played as a pianist might play it:

Be careful to accent each beat and to avoid notes bleeding into each other when they shouldn’t be. You could employ hybrid picking for these licks.

 Here’s the second iteration of the lick. This would be a cool way to end a solo and could easily be played over the V7 chord (G7 in this case) as well as the I7 or the IV7.

Whilst recording the example of this lick, on the 3rd & 4th time I began the lick on beat 3 so that the it ends on beat 1 of the next bar. This is a very useful thing to be able to do as it makes the using of your licks more malleable and less rigid.

Here’s the backing I made for you to practice to:

I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson. Do contact me if you have any questions.

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Thanks so much, James.