Look at the Duncans! Wow, I'm seeing double! I love that floating feel in your playing - it's playful and really pleasing to the ear. Those sweet double-stops in there fit perfectly. It's quite unusual, but I dig it! Your style is pretty unconventional, which is awesome. Really refreshing to hear such unique approaches in our jams.

Birgit - starting out just like BB King! I really dig your chord tone licks. I can hear several ideas that line up beautifully with the underlying chords. Very well done! Another thing I'm noticing - you're traveling up and down the neck more this time, playing more notes (you've got more to say). That's great because it shows you're finding the right notes and scale shapes all over the fretboard. Builds confidence for sure. And I love that vocal line at the end of your solo - brilliant! "Cause I nee-eee-eed, your love, so bad!" Perfect. Tell us how you came up with this solo!

Craig - nice mellow neck pickup tone and major pentatonic sound on the first pass. Then flipping that switch and getting the grittier bridge pickup tone with some minor pentatonic ideas - sweet! Creates nice contrast between mellow and bite. After that, those diminished shapes you moved up over the dim chord in the song created great tension and contrast from the pentatonics. Shows you know what you're doing. Tasty stuff.

As for me - I spent a lot of time stealing Peter Green licks. Maybe too much time, since I was late with my solo. I listened to 2 different Fleetwood Mac recordings and borrowed (okay, stole) most of my ideas from there. Great learning experience for me, since I find slow blues really difficult. I usually overplay and hate what I do.

This time, I deliberately wanted to sound authentic to the song, so I figured why not learn from the master himself - Peter Green? Truth is, I haven't listened to him much for some reason (wasn't exposed to him growing up) but I love what I've heard and really valued what I learned for this solo.

I'd strongly recommend you all try going deep on transcribing/learning a solo from someone whose playing you love. I've done this before with BB and Albert King and it's a fantastic way to get great blues phrases into your head. It's really hard to create authentic-sounding licks and solos if you don't spend time copying the greats.

Overall, fantastic jam - thanks you guys!

A big thank you, Robert, for your insightful analysis of our solos, including your own. I was very touched by that.

And I couldn't agree more with what you said about « transcribing/learning a solo from someone whose playing you love ».

You asked me how I came up with my solo:

I transcribed it from a video because the solo touched me so much because of the beautiful combination of major and minor pentatonic, blues scale, and arpeggios.

Since the original solo was too difficult for me in many places, I adapted some licks to both my abilities and our backing track.

For example, I adapted the opening lick, which actually begins with a whole tone bend in the original solo. I turned it into a slide followed by a vibrato.

I also adapted the lick over the dim chord and replaced it with a chord tone arpeggio.

I replaced a lot of 16th notes with 8th notes and kept checking to see if it still sounded good with my adjustments. That helped me learn a lot again.

Then it took me a long time to get the solo in my head before I picked up the guitar. I'm still grateful, Robert, for teaching me this approach! Otherwise, I would never have been able to play this solo!

And then I needed a lot, a lot, a lot of practice on the guitar!!!

Once again, a big thank you to Craig, Duncan, and you. I am simply thrilled with our Jam 12 😊.

And a special thank you to Craig for bringing us together so wonderfully in the video again.

Best regards, Birgit

Yes, special thanks to Craig for the awesome video!

Just curious, was it a performance video or was it a lesson that you learned from?

@robert, I transcribed the 2nd solo from minute 1:14 to 2:30.

Thanks very much for the kind words Robert. I have to admit that I don't really learn licks well at my age but small building block elements I can still manage. My approach has pretty much been to understand from first principles how the church modes are constructed and memorise these 7 note scale shapes. Virtually every other guitar system is automatically embedded in the fixed relationship between the modal shape at each degree of the 7 note (Ionian) major scale (regardless of what key one is playing in - e.g. C major, A minor (Aeolian), etc. This way I can navigate the fretboard easily and adjust when there is a key modulation. This allows me to simply improvise over virtually any piece of music (doesn't matter what genre) using the relationship between chord inversions located at each modal position along the neck. I think the new course you just recently mentioned is very much aligned with this approach. Ultimately, this means one can easily locate partial chords (3-note) and double stops, etc. wherever you find them on the fretboard and they will always match the scale elements or key for the piece. So, when I record anything it is pretty much 100% improv every time, and I don't need to rely on memorised lines much at all. However, I definitely agree that learning licks or pieces of music by writing out or transposing the piece can really solidify these elements in our personal bag of licks and tricks. Where my approach can bog down is that one does not want to just run up or down a scale so some connective tissues between the boxes (whether they are full 7 note modal boxes, or pentatonic blues boxes or CAGED boxes) is needed to integrate this knowledge and to create interest both across and along the fretboard and to match chord elements as needed. This is the more difficult part but I am certainly learning a great deal from you about ways to do this more effectively. So, thanks again for all the great advice that helps solidify our ability to stretch in new ways, to be more creative and musical, and to play more professionally.

I listen to Peter Greens take and then improvise.