WHEN I WAS a teenager, I went through a serious blues phase. One summer day, at a friend’s house, I was noodling around with the melody to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” on my no-name Strat-style guitar. After a few minutes, my friend, rather perturbed, asked, “Why do you always turn everything into a blues?”
Yes, I was deep into it, and along the way I found myself searching for a different approach to blues playing, one that would give easy access to any of the sounds, or musical “colors,” afforded by the major and minor pentatonic scales, no matter where I was on the fretboard. Switching back and forth always struck me as jarring and a bit too obvious. But whatever approach I took, I had to be able to make the guitar sound nasty in that bluesy way I loved.
I thought, Hey, everyone talks about modes; surely, there’s one magical mode out there. I looked to Mixolydian, as it has most of the signature color tones of the two pentatonics — plus, it’s tailor-made for playing over dominant 7th chords and blues progressions (no need to understand
