Beginner Blues Improvisation Lesson

The Foundation of Popular Music

You’ve got to have the sound of the Blues in your playing no matter what style of improvised music you’re making.

The sound of the Blues is the foundation of Jazz, Rock, Pop, Soul, Hip-Hop and every popular music style in Western culture. It’s also super fun to play and easy to get started, so in this lesson I’m going to quickly show you how to improvise over a 12 bar Blues progression and everyone can do this no matter what level you’re at.

If you follow my instructions you’re going to sound great right away, and set yourself up with a very solid foundation to build on going forward. Let’s begin.

Minor Pentatonic Scale

We’re just going to work with the five notes of the minor pentatonic scale. We’re going to be playing in the key of concert B-flat which is C for tenor saxophone and G for alto saxophone. Here are the notes of the minor pentatonic scale for all instruments. Let’s play them going up.

If you can read the notes as shown go ahead and do that. If you just want to look at the note names that’s fine too. Then, we’re going to play those five notes again, this time going down.

Go ahead practice the scale up and down a few times if you want. These five notes are very easy to memorize, so I recommend you try to do that as fast as you can so that you no longer need any visual reference.

Improvising Rhythms Rather Than Notes

Now that we have the notes we need to add some rhythm to it. Rhythm is actually more important than what notes we play, and that’s why I want you to think of improvising rhythms, rather than improvising notes.

The best way to do this is to limit the number of notes we can play so we only have to think about rhythm. So we’re going to take the first note of our scale and improvise with it over a backing track.

Everybody can play just one note, right? The key here is to leave a lot of space. We don’t want to fill every measure with notes. The spaces between rhythmic ideas are crucial to sounding good.

Later on I’m going to tell you how to download the backing track I’m playing over for free, as well as get a PDF with all the scales written out for you. I want you to practice that one note solo with space using each of the five notes, so you get used to what they sound like in context. This will also help you get that scale memorized quickly.

I’ll do one more this time on the next note of the scale which is concert D flat, E flat for tenor saxophone and B flat for alto saxophone.

Adding in More Notes

Okay, next step now that you’re used to improvising rhythms and leaving space, let’s add some more notes into the mix. If you want to be real methodical about it you can add one additional note at a time but I’m going to jump ahead to using three notes from the scale, the first three. Concert B flat, D flat, and E flat. For tenor that’s C, E flat and F, and for alto that’s G ,B flat, and C.

Remember, the most important thing to focus on is your rhythm and leaving space. All three of these notes work over the entire 12 bar blues chord progression, so we don’t have to worry about note choices.

After improvising with just one note at a time, three notes feels very liberating doesn’t it? What’s cool about this is that we know there’s more ingredients we can put in there. But for now we’re consciously holding back, leaving room to develop our story later on.

Practice improvising rhythmically and leaving space with random combinations of three notes out of the scale. Here’s another example using three different notes, let’s choose concert F, A flat, and B flat, which is G, B flat, and C for tenor, and D , F, and G for alto.

Using All 5 Notes of the Minor Pentatonic Scale

Now let’s skip ahead to our next step which is improvising with all five notes of the minor pentatonic scale. Keep in mind that a majority of people are going to ignore most of what I said and just blast away with the entire scale playing as many notes as possible with no attention paid whatsoever to rhythm and space.

That’s not going to sound very good unfortunately so please don’t be one of those people. If you want to sound good, you’ve got to play rhythmically and you’ve got to leave space.

Check out the video for an example of me playing with all five notes of the minor pentatonic scale over a 12 bar blues progression.

Free Backing Track and PDF

Now I want you to be able to practice this so I made this backing track and a PDF with everything written out available in the BetterSax Shed for free, along with tons of other lessons free courses and downloads.

You can sign up for the Shed here by clicking “Sign me up Jay!”. You’ll receive an email from us with access to the Shed, and you’ll find the Blues Improvisation downloads in the Improvisation category.

Blues Foundation and Blues Language

Now of course this video is just a very quick overview to help get you started. I have two fantastic video courses called Blues Foundation and Blues Language that have helped thousands of saxophonists get started improvising with the best habits while having the most fun possible.

Now go watch this video next to learn more about how you can use that pentatonic scale to improvise in another style of music.