The Hybrid Blues Scale

Hybrid Scale Lesson

What I want to look at now is something a bit special: the hybrid scale.

Overview

I'm going to take the A minor blues scale and the F sharp minor blues scale and overlay them. This works quite well if you can get your head around the scale itself.

The Scale

So, what you're going to be using is the following scale:

• Starting on F sharp.
• This is, believe it or not, a minor blues scale and F sharp minor blues scale at the same time. Sounds like a weird idea, but it actually works in practice, as long as you use your ears to guide you during the 12-bar progression.

Scale Pattern

I'll play it once more:

• Fret 2, 3, 4, 5 on the E string.
• Then, you move over and play every note between the second and the fifth fret.
• After that, play 2, 4, 5.
• Then, it mirrors itself on the next three strings by going 2, 4, 5.
• On the B string: 2, 3, 4, 5.
• Finally, on the G string: 2, 3, 5.

So the sequence is:

• 2, 3, 5
• 2, 3, 4, 5
• 2, 4, 5
• 2, 4, 5
• 2, 3, 4, 5
• 2, 3, 5

Demonstration

I'm going to demonstrate that over the same little shuffle that we were playing earlier. You can have a listen and see what sort of thing you can come up with over this. It's quite a fun scale that throws in a lot of weird notes, but sounds pretty cool, I think.

Let's Play

So, yeah. Let's do the shuffle again:

A one, a two, a one, two, three.

Okay, there you go!

Experimentation

There's some of it. It's obviously a bit silly, but you can muck around with it a lot and get quite a lot out of that if you experiment with it.

In particular, the chromatic notes on the B and on the A, for example, sound quite nice.

So, give that a go and see what sort of mileage you can obtain from that!