Discovering Diminished Triads in the Blues Scale

Did you know there are two blues scales?

One is the minor blues scale, aka “the bad boy” blues scale. It’s aggressive sounding. Dirty. Lots of stank.

The other blues scale is the major blues scale, aka “the nice guy” blues scale. It’s sweet sounding. Friendly and easygoing.

If you want to sound as bluesy as humanly possible in your solos, you’d best be able to improvise with both versions of the blues scale and come up with lines that flow from minor to major and major to minor.

Here’s a hip and modern way of doing just that by improvising with diminished triad pairs. But to create these diminished triads, we’ll need to merge “the bad boy” and “the nice guy” blues scales like so:

Check out the notes in orange that make up an Eb diminished triad and the notes in pink that make up an E diminished triad.

Let’s work these diminished triads into a line:

Again, the Eb diminished triad is in orange, the E diminished triad is in pink, and I also threw in a bonus A diminished triad, which is in blue.

Cool, right?

Now, if all these scale combinations and triad pairs sound advanced, it’s because they are.

But you don’t need to turn the blues scale inside out and upside down to play more soulful solos.

In fact, one of the quickest and most straightforward ways to play bluesier lines is to learn bluesy vocabulary.

That’s where the Sick Licks Blues collection comes into play. Level 1 includes simpler lines and Level 2 includes more complex lines. But both editions will help you inject MASSIVE amounts of soul into your solos.

Click here to hear some sample licks and check out the Classic and Modern editions, too!

Happy shedding!

Jeff