What Makes Music “Blue”?
Start using the “blue notes” to your advantage.
What makes the Blues sound blue?
The Blues is a genre of music that stems way back to Africa with a rich history. There is a ton of material on the Blues that helps describe its history across multiple time periods. The Blues is such an old musical concept that we can find it in plenty of countries and the cultures within each country’s regions. Today we’ll be looking at what gives the Blues its sound and how we can use it in any genre of music.
When we play a scale in western music, we normally use seven out of twelve notes that are available. This leaves five notes unaccounted for. The seven notes that belong to our scale are called diatonic notes, while the five notes that we skip over are non-diatonic notes. The blue notes are the non-diatonic notes, but each non-diatonic note creates its own “blue” texture.
Great blues musicians like B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan knew which blue notes to use and when to use them. It wasn’t like they just felt it, even though feeling the Blues is a big part of it. They knew that certain blue notes always sat next to specific diatonic notes.
Check out this performance by B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan. They are both using five-note pentatonic scales for the main scale. With two of the seven diatonic notes removed they can treat those two notes as color tones that are almost blue notes. These two notes are still diatonic, but they cause natural tension in a scale, so by removing them the blue notes sound even more tense than normal. Every time they bend a string to a slightly higher note, they are taking a diatonic note and raising it up to a non-diatonic note. Listen for notes that don’t cause tension (diatonic notes) and notes that have a lot of tension (non-diatonic blue notes). It’s not your job to figure out every note here. I just want you to have an appreciation for what blue notes can do.
Mapping Out the Blue Notes
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to know what notes always work, what notes can work, and which notes are blue? Well, that’s where the pentatonic scale comes in. Below are the notes of C Major Pentatonic and A Minor Pentatonic. In short, if you take a major pentatonic scale’s first degree note (in this case C) and move down a minor-third aka a step and a half, then you will get to the note (which will be A) that starts a minor pentatonic scale with the same notes.
Now I’ll add in our color tones in red and blue notes in, you guessed it, blue. The color tones will come from the modes C Ionian and A Aeolian. Because these modes are “relative modes” they share the same notes. We can also think of them as “paired modes” because their color tones in red are also the same notes, which are B and F.
If we tried to do this with F Major Pentatonic, we would use F Lydian as a relative mode. The problem is that F Lydian’s color tones of the 4th and 7th degrees are B and E, which are not the same color tones in C Major Pentatonic or A Minor Pentatonic.
Having everything lined up perfectly allows us to have a major and minor pentatonic scale that shares the same diatonic notes (in black), diatonic color tones (in red), and blue notes. Now we can start making phrases.
Using Blue as a Texture
The chart above uses all the notes, so we can think of them as the C Chromatic Scale and A Chromatic Scale. Instead of trying to play everything in a Chromatic Scale, we can focus on the Pentatonic Scales as our main framework. This allows the five black notes shown above to act as a set of “home base” notes. We can play those and have very little to no tension. This is especially true when playing C in a major format or A in a minor format because they are our tonic notes of C Major Pentatonic and A Minor Pentatonic.
Try playing C Major Pentatonic a little bit and ending some melodic phrases on the note C. Next, play those phrases with the note F in the middle of a phrase. Make sure to play F with a half-note duration or longer to get a sense of the tension that F can add. Now play another C Major Pentatonic phrase, but with B. This is the leading tone of C and is great to use just before ending a phrase.
After trying out the red notes of F and B in a major format you should move to A Minor Pentatonic. It’s the same notes but listen to how adding in our red color tones of F and B creates a new sound when ending a phrase on the note A. Be sure to not expect to hear the same sound as in a Major Pentatonic. When we are in a minor context, we will get minor sounds.
Now let’s go for one of our blue notes. Our first blue note will be Eb/D#. We can use this note in one of two ways: as a passing tone or an auxiliary tone. Passing tones are notes that are used between two notes in an ascending or descending chromatic line. Auxiliary tones are notes that are used briefly as you move from a diatonic note, to a non-diatonic note, and back to a diatonic note.
Above we have a quick example, which starts with the notes C, E, and A. These notes spell out a C major triad. The next bar has an ascending line of D, Eb, E. Eb is our blue note and is used as a passing tone to create some wanted tension. It fits in perfectly because the notes above and below the passing tone are both diatonic notes. The second bar ends with C, B, C. B is our diatonic color tone. It doesn’t belong to C Major Pentatonic, but it does work with C Ionian. Since B is also the leading tone of C, we can move from C to an auxiliary tone of B and then return to our tonic note of C.
We can do the same thing with our A Minor Pentatonic Scale. This time Eb becomes D#. This will make sense if you are using Major scales with Harmonic Major and Minor scales with Harmonic Minor. You can read up on those scales at “An Intro to Harmonic Major” and “An Intro to Harmonic Minor”.
Here we have another bar that spells out a triad, but this time we are using A, C, and an ascending line to E to play the notes of an Am triad. The ascending line uses D, D#, E with D# as the passing tone. The next bar uses D, C, G#, and A. G# is a blue note that is used solely for the purpose of adding a leading tone to A. We don’t always have to use blue notes as passing and auxiliary tones. We can use blue notes for function as well, and a leading tone is always great to use when ending a phrase on the tonic note.
Now try out the other blue notes on your own. If you play Db in C Major Pentatonic, then try our C# in A Minor Pentatonic. The note Db/C# will have a different effect and knowing how the same note can be used in two ways can really expand upon your arsenal of melodic phrases.
If you find some interesting uses in these shades of blue, then let us all know in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
