Improvising with minor Scales–G minor

[Michael]

😎 Hey Johnny,

If I’m going to improvise in a minor scale, I can use both the minor pentatonic and minor blues scale over a 12 bar blues progression, correct? I’m working on a solo of my own for “Green Onions” and the backing track I got from Karaoke is in Fm, so that means Gm for Tenor and my thought was to make use of both the pentatonic and blues scale in my solo. Karaoke let’s us change the key signature up 2 semi tones up to Gm and that would mean to play it on Tenor in Am, which I believe was the same key that King Curtis did his version of the Green Onions in? That’s what I hear anyway, but I could be wrong.

[john]

Yes absolutly right on all counts Micheal! That’s a perfect track to practice on. Listen to what he’s doing and see if you can copy some of the licks, this is how we learn!

[Michael]

90% of what I’ve been doing while away from home is your exercises in Killer Blues–I’ll work on the solo from Brown Sugar when I get back–I’ve practiced them to the point where I just don’t have to think about it and it’s almost like I can “hear” the scale. Back home in the South, if you can’t play the blues then no one is really interested in hearing you! Totally different than here in New Mexico; Improvisation with Blues and Rock is almost nonexistant.

I was going to e-mail you Johnny the custom backing track we created for this great song to get your feedback on it, I would upload it here to your site but haven’t had success uploading mp3 files, not sure why. Karaoke had custom features where we could eliminate the Organ portion of the song. I downloaded that and then I went back to my file on Karaoke and eliminated the Guitar licks and downloaded that one too. With the use of our cpu, we meshed the 2 tracks together to create one single backing track in particular for this terrific song.

[Author]

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