How to Solo Over a Blues?

by Ari • 18 Mar 2017 — 1 minute read

A quick and easy roadmap for a good blues solo…

If you are looking to sound more bluesy, here are some tips… from the blues scale to telling your life story, these strategies will make you sound authentic and like you know what you are doing at the same time. Maybe you already know the blues scale, but did you know that there is a major one as well as a minor one? Which to use when and how… check it out, you got this!

I am a bit tongue in cheek of course with some of the things I say here…. but they work! A blues is all about telling a story, and as cliche as this sounds, here I am telling you very concretely how to do this with musical phrases.

Click here to read my post

What scale to use over the blues (other than the blues scale, that is)

Subscribe to Newsletter

August 14, 2026

Your Hands Don’t Have Muscles (But They Have This)

July 20, 2026

Knowing the notes isn’t the hard part. This is.

July 1, 2026

Chromatic Groove… in 7/8!

June 26, 2026

Diagonal Pentatonic Patterns up the Bass Neck

Shop on Amazon

Your Hands Don’t Have Muscles (But They Have This)

My Intentional 3-step Bass Warm-up Before every gig, every session, every practice, I run the same short bass warm-up. It’s

Practicing Hacks

Ariane Cap
July 20, 2026

Knowing the notes isn’t the hard part. This is.

Bass Improvisation Tips: Why It Feels Hard & How to Finally Make It Musical I hear a lot of rumbling

Theory and Improv

Ariane Cap
July 1, 2026

Chromatic Groove… in 7/8!

Chromatic Grooves and groovin’ in 7/8 (odd meter). We combine these two different gems in this lesson. Get the TAB

Teaching Videos

Bassist, author, educator.

Groove enthusiast and learning nerd.

Joined by 15,000+ Bassists

Your Instructor

Hi. I'm Ari.

As a bassist, I have toured/played/recorded with a variety of rock, Jazz, and funk bands, I have worked with some incredible producers (Keith Olsen) and musicians (Paul Hanson, Muriel Anderson) and I toured Brazil with Stu Hamm as a duo.

As a bass teacher, I have taught at London Bass Day, Gerald Veasley’s Bass Boot Camp, SBL, Truefire, notreble… I even ran my own music school for a few years before gigs took me back on the road.

One thing to know about me is that I teach because I am absolutely fascinated with the learning process. And I am obsessed with helping others realize their musical potential.

When I started playing bass, I excelled very quickly because I had an amazing teacher who taught me using a powerful method. This method transformed my playing so quickly that I passed a bunch of high-level university auditions and even tested out of entire classes at university even though I had been playing for only a very short time.

That’s what, many years later turned into one of my books, co-written with Wolf Wein, called “The Pattern System for the Bass Player”. I created entire systems of learning based on some of these ideas and wrote books and created courses together with Wolf. Our bass books have sold over 30,000 copies and garnered rave reviews.

I started teaching online in 2009 and have embraced technology as a powerful learning tool since then, never losing sight of the importance of providing feedback and personalized guidance to learners.

Read more…