Freddie King Nobody’s Business Style Podcast 137

WEBVTT Hey guys, John here from LearningGuitarNow.com and in this lesson, I want to show you how to play a Freddie King Nobody's Business style solo. This is an eight-bar blues. It's in the key of C sharp and Freddie King has always been one of my favorite blues guitar players. It's just got a really cool style with a lot of overbending and some unique phrasing and it's just a lot of fun to play.

This eight-bar blues in particular is one of my favorites that he does. To get the tone for the lesson, I'm using this Gibson 335 with a Victoria 45410. We'll go ahead and take a look at a portion of the lesson for free and if you would like the full lesson with the interactive tab, the backing track guitar profiles, check out the all access pass. Also have a free blues guitar mini course that shows you how to start breaking out of that first position minor pentatonic box.

Enter your email at the link in the description below to get instant access completely free. Okay, let's go ahead and start this lesson. Okay, now I'm going to break the solo down for you into nine separate licks. Once again, this is in the key of C sharp and lick one sounds like this.

Okay, lick one, pretty cool, Freddie King inspired lick. We're coming in on the 10, 11, 12 counts. We're counting this 12 eight slow blues. Once again, it's key of C sharp and I'm starting this.

You know, when I'm in C sharp, not as many people are going to play in that. You can always find your first position minor pentatonic scale by finding the one, two, three, fourth dot here, or in this case, we have a rectangle. You know, whatever your guitar has, they normally have like some kind of dot. You can see it up here as well as here.

Most guitars are going to have that. That's how you can find C sharp easy, you know, C sharp. You can find a lot of notes like that, you know, third, G, A, B, C sharp. To me, that's an easy way to find.

Start finding notes on the fretboard is looking at those dots and memorizing what they are. You can instantly jump to the first position minor pentatonic of G, A, B, C sharp. So that's what I like to do is just a little bit of a guideline to jumping around the fretboard pretty quickly. So we know ninth fret is our first position minor pentatonic scale.

Now we're going to add the major pentatonic to this first section. So we've got nine, 11, nine, 11. So we're just playing on 10th, 11th and 12th count, nine, 11, nine, and accenting those three notes. Then gradually bending that 11th fret on a higher E string.

And you can kind of just, you know, you want to use your ears. Don't say, okay, I got to bend to 13th fret. You know, just gradually bend it and cut it off whenever you feel like it. You see Freddie King doing stuff like that.

He'd go and just throw the guitar up like that. If you watch him, you know, it doesn't have to be perfectly in tune to a note. That's a lot of times the blues is that added tune kind of stuff, but you have to be at a tune in the right place. Anyway, that's the first section.

Next section, we got this. So I just hit nine, then went back straight minor pentatonic, bend 12th fret up, pull it down, borrow your first finger on the ninth fret, E and B. Now strike 12th on the B, E and B. Now strike 12th on the B, heavy vibrato.

Now walk down 12, nine, 11 on the G, nine on the B, and then slightly bend that ninth fret of the G string. Sounds really cool. Also, the way that I'm striking this with the pick is to see I'm putting my hand more around the bridge and using the round side of this Fender medium pick and getting more of a quacky sound. I know Freddie King didn't really use a pick, but I think you can approximate that type of sound.

You can get different tones changing this. More of a up. You get a more sharp sound the more that you don't rotate it. Anyway, that's a really cool lick to play, and I think it's an excellent way to start an eight bar blues like this.

Okay, that's it for lick one. Okay, lick two sounds like this. Okay, so for lick two, this is a calmly heard thing you hear in blues, especially Freddie King liked to do this. We'll go to our second position minor pentatonic scale.

You know, you got this 12, 14, 12, 14, and we're just going to add 12, 13, 14. That's our minor third, major third, fourth interval. And you know, BB King, Freddie King, they do that kind of stuff a lot. It's pretty easy to do, you know.

You don't have to think about the theory at all. It's just second position minor pentatonic scale, 12, 13, 14. And you can kind of play a little bit lazy. So you kind of drag the notes and you just do it kind of by feel, you know.

We're not just trying to play exact notes. We're trying to play more of a kind of a drag feel. It's kind of a hard thing to explain, but I'm just trying to like drag the beat a little bit because I hear BB King, Freddie King doing that kind of stuff a lot. Lazy bends like that.

So your 14th fret kind of stretch that bend, pull down, release to 12. You don't have to play it exactly the same way that I play it all the time. You can kind of, you know, stretch that out. Something like that.

Something like that. That's the key with the blues stuff, you know. It's all improvised, so you don't want to get in your mind that I have to play it this way every single time. You know, that's a great way to not sound good when playing blues.

You just want to try to vary things as you hear them in your head and as you play and improvise more, more things will come to your head, especially if you're listening to blues players a lot. Then that heavy vibrato on our 14th fret and then I'm just cutting it off slightly on our 12th fret of the high E string. Now we're doing this calmly heard move. You're hearing blues, so we're going 14-12 and then pulling off our fourth to our major third interval.

You hear Freddie King doing that a lot. In this case, I'm just doing one, two, three, four, five times. It's just a really fun thing to play. Just, you know, pulling off a third finger to second finger.

So if you're not really good at doing that, make a good exercise or pull off 14 to 13. Then we got to do the same thing again. Then pull down, release to 12 and 14. So, you know, two really cool licks you can play right there.

Okay. Well, that does it for this lesson. Once again, if you would like the full lesson, the interactive tab guitar pro backing track, check out the all access pass. Okay.

See you next time.