This is the 7th installment in my ‘Breaking Down the Blues’ series of posts. You can find the other posts here.
If you’ve arrived at a point in your journey in learning to play blues on the guitar where you’re comfortable with the minor and major pentatonic scales, as well as the blues scale, and you’re looking to expand beyond the confines of those scales, the dorian scale is the best next place to go.
The dorian scale sounds great when played over a 12 bar blues progression, and it’s a relatively easy scale to incorporate into your blues playing. It sounds great over the entire progression, so you don’t have to be worried about where in the progression you use it (unlike the major pentatonic scale). As you’ll see in the video, you can form the dorian scale just by adding a couple notes to the minor pentatonic scale.
This video does a quick breakdown of just what the dorian scale is (its actually a mode rather than a scale). It goes through how you could think about this scale on the guitar if you’re playing in a blues genre. And, I also go through some general concepts of things I like to do when using this scale to solo – the intention being that you can then experiment with these same ideas in your own way, with your own improvisations.
And, in my next post (posting next week) I’ll go through an entire blues solo that uses the dorian scale throughout it. I’ll include a tab, and a note by note breakdown of each phrase. So, if you’re looking for a very tangible, concrete example of how to use this scale when playing the blues, then keep an eye out for that.