Improv With:
The Thrill is Gone

Let's check out a chord sheet for BB King's "The Thrill is Gone".

First we will examine the chords, then we will discuss playing lead.

As you can see a simple chord sheet doesn't give us a ton of information about the song.

There's a general expectation that you're already familiar with the style of the genre and feel of the song. (Which we may not be!)

If you've ever looked at a tricky chord sheet for a jazz song you probably found that it was not sufficient information on it's own.

Fortunately, blues is a more flexible genre. We have just 4 chords to play here: Bm, Em, G, and F#7.

Since the tempo and strumming pattern are not specified, it'll be hard to know how to play this on it's own.

You have two choices, either listen to the song and get a feel for it, or, just play it according to what feels right to you!

Now, we don't have keep our chords as simple as notated here. My preference is to play the Bm and G as 7th chords.

That will give us Bm7 - Em - Gmaj7 - and F#7.

Can you figure out how to play those on your own? Consult your Barre Shapes if needed.

We can take it further though. It's common to use the #9 over a dominant chord leading back to the root in blues. That's the Hendrix Chord, of course.

That gives us the option of playing the F#7 as an F#7(#9).

Regarding the lead, we can center our playing around the Bm Blues Pentatonic. With this set of chords, you can comfortably stay on this scale the whole time without any issue. In fact, that's the standard blues approach. The clashes that can occur with this method are largely tolerable, they're actually part of the blues sound.

If you're satisfied with that, feel free to stop here until you're looking for ways to take it further. 

Still here? Let's go deeper.

Over the Bm, I'll usually keep things simple by sticking relatively closely to the Pentatonic. It's a good idea for the tonic chord to feel like home, and it's a good time to dig in to any Form 1 riffs you have locked and loaded. It's the other chords where we can look into departing from familiar territory.

The Em is diatonic to Bm. It's the iv chord using scale degrees 4-6-1. That means we can add the 6th into our playing here!

You'll notice that if you play the 6th over Bm it sounds quite tense, so including the 6th only along with the Em is a great way to mix up your playing by incorporating a chord tone.

During the G, we can switch to a G or Gmaj7 arpeggio in the 10th position, which even leaves us open to blending that with the Form 2 of the Pentatonic for some really cool options.

And now for the F#7. This chord is non-diatonic to the key of Bm, and a moment of tension. That gives us a lot of room to play with. For this lesson we'll keep it simple, but it's good to remember that the more exploratory moments in improv are often the tense ones. You can get away with a lot of wild playing if it resolves nicely along with the V7 to the next chord.

One straightforward approach would be to continue with the arpeggio method, and stick to a F#7 arpeggio. This is already a great approach as it will incorporate tones outside of the Pentatonic scale (namely, the major 2nd and major 7th, relative to B).

We can also simply drop those intervals into our Bm Blues Pentatonic. It'll sound great if you play the major 7th just before returning to B along with the backing. (That's a leading tone.)

There are a ton of other scale based options here though. For example:

• Mixolydian Mode

• B Harmonic Minor

• F# Phrygian Dominant

• The Whole-Half Scale

• The Altered Scale

We haven't covered the majority of that just yet. I include it here just to give you an idea of how much fun you can have with Dominant chords. Feel free to try any of those scales out over a Dominant - they're just a Google away!

That's as deep as we'll go for this lesson. If you haven't already, try listening to the song or one of the many "The Thrill is Gone" backing tracks on Youtube. This is a great song to get familiar with if you're interested in building a repertoire.