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Old 12-25-2020, 03:20 PM
vanceen vanceen is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2017
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Personally, I would rarely play strict pentatonic minor over a I IV V progression. If I did, it would be if I was playing blues, by which I mean blues blues, not a jazz blues tune.

Stevie Ray Vaughn used almost exclusively pentatonic minor for soloing. I would never say that he hadn't worked his stuff out. He just worked it out in a niche style that worked well for him.

For blues soloing, I'll usually switch back and forth from minor to major pentatonic, and throw in lots of seconds and sixth as needed to follow the changes. Clapton even uses the major seventh scale tone in blues, and it sounds great.

It's a genre thing. Jazz is a genre too, albeit quite a bit more complex. But there are distinct sub-genres in jazz. If you're playing bebop you're going to be leaning on some scale tones you wouldn't use in Dixieland for instance.

The best advice I ever got for learning to play more jazz is to listen and copy. Then listen and copy some more. Repeat as required. Let the songs and the sounds and the feel get under your skin. Then you won't be thinking about scales when you play. Yes, you'll need to practice all the scales a bunch and get to where they are second hand, but if you're thinking about scales when you're playing a song, you're probably playing something pretty boring.
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