amineessani
Verified buyer
08/01/25
The best app ever
Breakthrough Blues-Rock Soloing
Next-Level Melodic Approaches for Blues-Rock Improvisation
Get this course and 1,000+ more with All Access
Try 14 days free. Cancel any time.
Jeff McErlain
Educator
Genres
About this course
The blues-rock genre has provided a vehicle for some of the most legendary guitar soloists on the planet. Players like Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Jeff Beck, Michael Schenker, Eric Johnson, and David Gilmour are all widely celebrated for their more advanced harmonic and melodic approach to blues-rock soloing.
"As guitarists, we all reach a plateau in our soloing at some point. A big breakthrough for me was when I started tweaking my minor and major pentatonic scales and looking at harmony through a slightly more sophisticated lens. In this course, I’ll share a number of simple concepts to help you breakthrough and expand your musical palette - without getting too bogged down in modes and theory studies."
You'll start the course with a quick primer covering must-know blues-rock soloing approaches like mixing minor and major pentatonic scales to form modes, some ways to find the sweet notes anywhere in a progression, tone tips, inflection, and dynamics to help you get more color, tension, and feeling from your solos regardless of what style you’re playing. Jeff will then guide you through 10 blues-rock performance studies across a variety of keys and feels, each of which highlights an essential flavor of the blues-rock lexicon.
Jeff McErlain will explain and demonstrate all of the key concepts and approaches along the way. You’ll get standard notation and tabs for all of the performance studies. Plus, you’ll be able to use TrueFire’s learning tools to sync the tab and notation to the video lesson. You can also loop or slow down the videos so that you can work with the lessons at your own pace. All of the backing tracks are included to work with on your own as well.
Grab your guitar and break through with Jeff McErlain!
"As guitarists, we all reach a plateau in our soloing at some point. A big breakthrough for me was when I started tweaking my minor and major pentatonic scales and looking at harmony through a slightly more sophisticated lens. In this course, I’ll share a number of simple concepts to help you breakthrough and expand your musical palette - without getting too bogged down in modes and theory studies."
You'll start the course with a quick primer covering must-know blues-rock soloing approaches like mixing minor and major pentatonic scales to form modes, some ways to find the sweet notes anywhere in a progression, tone tips, inflection, and dynamics to help you get more color, tension, and feeling from your solos regardless of what style you’re playing. Jeff will then guide you through 10 blues-rock performance studies across a variety of keys and feels, each of which highlights an essential flavor of the blues-rock lexicon.
Jeff McErlain will explain and demonstrate all of the key concepts and approaches along the way. You’ll get standard notation and tabs for all of the performance studies. Plus, you’ll be able to use TrueFire’s learning tools to sync the tab and notation to the video lesson. You can also loop or slow down the videos so that you can work with the lessons at your own pace. All of the backing tracks are included to work with on your own as well.
Grab your guitar and break through with Jeff McErlain!
Jeff McErlain's Preferred Gear
Below is a list of Jeff McErlain's preferred gear including guitars, amps, pedals, accessories, and more. What you see in Jeff's lessons may or may not be this actual gear, but if you are trying to capture Jeff's sound and tone, the gear listed below is recommended by Jeff and it's a great place to start!
Guitars
- Gibson SG Guitar
- Gibson Les Paul Goldtop Guitar
- Fender Stratocaster Guitar
- Tuttle Carve Top Supreme Guitar
Amps
Pedals
- Fulltone Octafuzz OF-2 Fuzz / Octave Pedal
- Strymon Flint Tremolo and Reverb Pedal
- Xotic EP Booster Pedal
- Ibanez Tube Screamer Overdrive Pedal
- Fulltone OCD Distortion Pedal
- Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Fuzz Face Pedal
- TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb Pedal
- MXR Carbon Copy Analog Delay Pedal
- TC Electronic Flashback 2 Delay and Looper Pedal
- Fulltone Supa-Trem Tremolo Pedal
- Boss Super Chorus Pedal
- MXR Flanger Pedal
- MXR Phase 90 Phase Shifter Pedal
- MXR Dyan Comp Compressor Pedal
- Ernie Ball VP JR Volume Pedal
- Dunlop Original Cry Baby Wah Wah Pedal
- MXR M199 Tap Tempo Pedal
Accessories & More
What you'll learn
- Play a sophisticated solo over the Hummingbird chord progression
- Master the technique of playing melodic lines rather than just licks
- Understand how to add natural third to blues scale for dominant sound
- Learn to create chromatic lines that connect scale tones musically
- Understand how to mix major and minor pentatonic scales over a mixolydian progression
Release date: 11/21/2019 • 2h 19m runtime
Sample lessons
Natural Thing
Performance
Jimi Univibes
Performance
Nectar of the Gods
Overview
Nectar of the Gods
Performance
What's included
33 lessons • 10 charts • 10 Jam Tracks
Breakthrough | Blues-Rock Soloing
Hi, I'm Jeff McErlain. Welcome to the Soloing Edition of Breakthrough Blues-Rock!
One thing I've learned in all my years playing and teaching is to keep things simple. In this course, I want to help you make some breakthroughs in your playing by adding maybe just one note to your minor pentatonic scale, mixing to pentatonic scales, or targeting a chord tone.
Feel free to jump around the course as I didn't put anything in difficulty order. If you feel you're struggling to play one of the examples, then don't! Watch the breakdown, and try to incorporate just one of the ideas in a simple away as he possibly can. Baby steps is the answer!
One thing I've learned in all my years playing and teaching is to keep things simple. In this course, I want to help you make some breakthroughs in your playing by adding maybe just one note to your minor pentatonic scale, mixing to pentatonic scales, or targeting a chord tone.
Feel free to jump around the course as I didn't put anything in difficulty order. If you feel you're struggling to play one of the examples, then don't! Watch the breakdown, and try to incorporate just one of the ideas in a simple away as he possibly can. Baby steps is the answer!
Soloing Breakthroughs
As a rock guitar player, our world largely revolves around the minor blues scale. We can go really far with that scale but at some point we're going to hit a wall. The minor blues scale just doesn't cover all the needs that we have to get to some more interesting ideas.
The first thing we can experiment with is becoming comfortable with the major pentatonic scale - we hear this sound quite often in bands like the Allman Bros. But, the real breakthrough for me was when I started to mix the two scales together! The minor blues scale is spelled: R-b3-4-b5-5-b7. The major blues scale is spelled: R-2-b3-3-5-6. If we combine, them it gives us: R-2-b3-3-4-b5-5-6-b7. Sometimes this is called the altered blues scale. Wow, that's a lot of notes to deal with! I don't look at it as a scale on it's own, as that's too much to take in. As you will see in this section, I can look at the scale as major or minor and it largely revolves around the third of the scale, all the other notes can remain the same.
The first thing we can experiment with is becoming comfortable with the major pentatonic scale - we hear this sound quite often in bands like the Allman Bros. But, the real breakthrough for me was when I started to mix the two scales together! The minor blues scale is spelled: R-b3-4-b5-5-b7. The major blues scale is spelled: R-2-b3-3-5-6. If we combine, them it gives us: R-2-b3-3-4-b5-5-6-b7. Sometimes this is called the altered blues scale. Wow, that's a lot of notes to deal with! I don't look at it as a scale on it's own, as that's too much to take in. As you will see in this section, I can look at the scale as major or minor and it largely revolves around the third of the scale, all the other notes can remain the same.
Lost in a Solo
Strangely, one of the most difficult things to solo over is a simple major two chord progression. The progression is very simple, just E major to A major, but it always used to kick my butt! Major pentatonic would sound okay, minor pentatonic was just not that great, so I always used to falter. Here we'll take a look at how to navigate this chord progression by hitting chord tones and mixing the major and minor pentatonic scales for some familiar, cool, and a central sounds.
Lost in a Solo
For the solo, I'm channeling some cool classic guitar players like Duane Allman, Dickie Betts, and Eric Clapton. This kind of playing falls squarely into what we call "Americana", or "alt country". I just call it rock 'n' roll. It's extremely important to listen to some of the great guitar players in that genre to get a good feel of what can be done in what you're shooting for! Beyond just learning the solo, I highly recommend finding more solos in this style and working through them.
Lost in a Solo
Okay I admit, I am secretly trying to teach you how to play using the modes. Now I may sound contradictory, I don't normally think modally, as I do think more about mixing both major and minor pentatonic scales. But sonically, overall I hear this chord progression as falling into Mixolydian. Mixolydian is a very specific sound; I hear it as happy with bluesy overtones. Jam bands use the sound a lot like the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. Van Halen use it quite a bit too, all of which contain a real mixture of the major and minor pentatonic scales.
Natural Thing
In our second solo, I'm borrowing very heavily from one of my guitar heroes, Michael Schenker. To me, he doesn't get the credit he is due at being one of the most influential rock 'n' roll guitar players of the 70's and 80's. He's the guitar player I really learned how to get this Mixolydian/major/minor pentatonic blues sound. I highly recommend you check 'em out, especially the legendary record from the band UFO, Strangers in the Night. If you don't know what, you can thank me later...
Natural Thing
Okay, there's a lot of stuff going on here! What I would really shoot for overall, knowing this is a somewhat challenging guitar solo, is understanding how I'm mixing both G major and minor pentatonic scales. The chord progression is G to C, so when we have two chords like this the proper scale can be somewhat ambiguous. We could be in the key of G major or we could be in the key of G Mixolydian. In rock 'n' roll, I'll almost always take Mixolydian! G Mixolydian is spelled G-A-B-C-D-E-F-G. If we were to spell out our chords: G major is G-B-D, C major is C-E-G, and putting them in order we would get G-A-B-D-C-E. The only one we don't have is the F. As a general rule, blues rock is rarely used and Ionian (major) scale, it just doesn't sound that bluesy. The Ionian scale would have a natural seventh degree, and this case that would be F#. Try playing that over this chord progression and see what it sounds like. It won't be bad, but it won't be correct for a classic bluesy rock sound!
+ 26 more lessons
Reviews
24 results
snot75
Verified buyer
03/19/25
À Wonderful teacher !!!!
I love this teacher and his technique to teach you how to play gives great inspiration
Kevin7678
Verified buyer
01/04/25
so lots of diversity, dynamics and good sound in here, Really enjoying it. Jeff great as always
raytcampbell
Verified buyer
01/02/23
McErlains Journey from Basic Blues to Awesome
I'm a Jeff McErlain fan! His presentation is excellent and, his playing is fun to listen to. In this course McErlain presents many of his breakthrough realizations that have taken him from the "Box" to a cutting edge player. Each lesson starts with the basics most of us should know and then show how he developed the next step, and the next... Lots of great material here and as always, if you like an idea and practice it in every key, you have hundreds of hours of material.
AlexSoultonestudios
Verified buyer
01/01/23
Glad i bought it
Good stuff. Useful tabs. For 5$ its worth buying
Stop searching. Start improving with All Access.
Try 14 days free. Cancel any time.
