WHEN SOLOING OVER a standard 12-bar blues progression, you can improvise solely using the blues scale and come away sounding great. But there’s one bar in the progression that requires you to make a choice — the lone appearance of the V (five) chord in bar 9. (This chord can also appear in bar 12, as part of a turnaround, but for this lesson we’ll mostly focus on bar 9.) Here it’s a case where not making a choice and relying solely on the blues scale actually is a choice, and a valid one at that, as we’ll see. Of course, many blues greats have their own pet ways of addressing the V chord, and the goal of this lesson is to illustrate and present a few easy ways to add some appealing colors to your melodic palette.
First, let’s take a quick look at why the appearance of the V chord opens up more
