Dreamy Guitar Solo (Blues, Americana) in Am
Funny how music serves as a counterweight. When my life’s busy, I write smooth, slow-burn solos like this one. A Blues Americana guitar solo in A minor, influenced by Mark Knopfler’s playing. Enjoy!
About This Solo
I wrote this minor blues track to express a recurring feeling I experience in Autumn, a feeling of quiet gloom, best felt when talking a walk into the colorful woods this time of the year.
The solo is heavily influenced by Mark Knopfler’s playing. A clean, spacious guitar sound with emphasis on right hand dynamics, the A minor pentatonic and the odd blue note (Eb).I love these slow-burning blues-country-roots licks that you’ll find in Mark Knopfler’s more recent work.
Featured concepts
Expanding on this playing style, I play a few unusual double stops with major second intervals. These are somewhat uncommon on guitar and carry a soft and glassy dissonance that supports the mood here. You’ll notice I create these by letting adjacent strings to ‘ring’ out.
Finally, I bring out the colors of the harmonic minor scale in bar 13 (the ‘lazy’ pickup). I like the somber tone of this scale. Venturing into this sound often brings me to diminished triads (look for them in the outro!). The inspiration for these harmonic minor guitar licks comes from listening to gypsy swing artists like Django Reinhardt and Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies).
I hope you enjoy this solo. It feels like something new for this channel. Sometimes making these videos can be really hard work. But for this video, it felt more like surfing on a creative ‘flow’, less strenuous and without (over)thinking too much. Although there must be a bit of suffering in creating art, it’s better when it’s not too much 😉 Let’s see where this mindset brings me in the future.
Backing Track
Gear Used
- Suhr Modern Pro HH
- Victory V40
- pedals; Tc Electronic The Spark (booster) – heavily recommended! I like it so much I have 2 😉
- Eventide H9 (spring reverb) in the FX Loop
- captured with Universal Audio Ox
