Minor Blues

The minor blues is an eight-tone scale created by combining the tones of a straight blues scale with those of natural minor (see page 26). Here are the notes, tones, and intervallic structure of the resulting hybrid scale beginning on A.

A minor blues, “boxes” 1 – 5

The patterns of the minor blues scale are not strictly “boxes” (they are more than two notes per string) but we will refer to them this way because this scale can be viewed as a minor pentatonic (or blues) with added color tones. Below, the A minor pentatonic boxes are shown in solid dots, with the added tones of A minor blues (2nd, ♭5th, ♭6th) shown in grey dots.

Fingering: Box 1 is in fifth position (stretch back a fret on string 3 then slide up immediately to play the remaining notes in fifth position). Box 2, in seventh position, utilizes a similar procedure (slide the fourth finger up a fret on strings 1 and 6). Where boxes 3, 4, and 5 call for four notes on a string, play the first three as positional fingering, then slide your fourth finger up to catch the last note. Reverse this for descending.

Here are the five interconnected patterns on the neck. Play up and down each pattern, shifting from one to the next until you can play it from memory. To help keep things straight, use the minor pentatonic shapes that you already know as a “skeletal” framework, upon which the extra notes of the minor blues can be seen to “hang.”

Now, try the full neck. Because of how the patterns lay together, one note appears doubled in bracketed boxes 4 and 1. Following the directions in parentheses will yield the same shapes as on the previous page.

Other tonalities

Below, the minor blues scale is also shown in E and C. To play the scale in tonalities not shown here, simply shift the entire sequence of boxes up or down the fretboard. (See page 63 for note names on the neck.)