John Mayer Blues Licks

Hi GMC!

Welcome to my lesson on John Mayer blues licks. On this occasion we are going to study an improvisation that John made in one of his instagram livestreams.

As you can hear in this lesson, John's style of blues is very classic, inspired by the great blues legends. However there is something magical in his way of playing and improvising that makes him stand out from the rest and allows him to be placed among the greatest in history. In this lesson we are going to try to decipher a little bit about the elements and tools that he uses when improvising blues.

The backing track is a typical D blues progression and the tempo is 93 bpm. We will be using mainly pentatonic scales, the D major and minor pentatonic, and the A minor pentatonic, with the addition of some passing notes, such as the blue note (b5). We will cover the backing track and scales in the first part of this lesson.

For the guitar sound I used Quad Cortex, and if you're lucky enough to have one you can download my sound from my profile on the Cortex Cloud.

Let's get started!