Essentials: Bebop Blues Etudes

Sheryl Bailey’s Bebop Blues Etudes edition of Essentials will accelerate your understanding of the underlying harmonic structure for creating melodies on a blues that goes beyond running up and down blues scales. Sheryl will guide you through the principles of "riffing" and combining traditional blues guitar language into the language of bebop.

”I've prepared 10 bebop blues soloing performance studies that focus on the technical and harmonic skills that all of our favorite bebop guitar players use in their own solos and improvisations. We’ll concentrate on the use of chord tones as the focal point of the melodic line to avoid being stuck in the blues scale box. Along the way, we’ll also work on concepts and techniques like placing and displacing rhythms, chord extensions, chord soloing, modern chord substitutions, playing over minor 2-5s, applying the dominant 7 bebop scale and chromatic melodic embellishments.”

You'll start the course by learning a 12/8 Shuffle Blues in the key of G that uses drop 2 chords to harmonize the melody, followed by an etude for used on a Jimmy Smith style shuffle that uses arpeggios to create melodic lines. You’ll explore a funky Herbie Hancock style approach for soloing and work on an approach Sheryl calls Implying the Invisible Two Five.

As you work through the course, you’ll learn how to use chromatic melodic embellishments, displaced rhythmic phrases, minor two fives using the diminished seven to hippify the dominant, interesting applications for triads over a 12-bar jazz blues progression, and how to employ the minor-seven-flat-five arpeggio in a variety of ways over a Coltrane-style minor blues.

Sheryl guides you through 10 bebop blues soloing studies that cover the most widely used chord progressions, keys and tempos in the genre. For each performance study, Sheryl will first demonstrate the solo and then break it down for you note-by-note.

All of the performance studies are tabbed and notated for your practice, reference and study purposes. You’ll also get Guitar Pro files so that you can play, loop and/or slow down the tab and notation as you work through the lessons. Plus, Sheryl includes all of the backing tracks for you to work with on your own.

Grab your guitar and let’s play some bebop blues with Sheryl Bailey!