John Wheatcroft is head of guitar at "Tech Music School" in London. Outside classroom he is constantly busy performing and sharing his knowledge through other media.

He regularly contributes to "Guitar World" (USA), "Guitarist" and "Guitar Techniques" magazines and he has recently released his first book, "Improvising Blues Guitar" , published by Schott Publishing.

He has toured the world with Carl Palmer (ELP) and John Jorgenson (Elton John/Hellecasters). He performed alongside artists as diverse as Mike Stern (Miles Davis), Frank Gambale (Chic Corea) and Glen Hughes (Deep Purple).

John currently fronts his own acoustic quintet exploring the music of Django Reinhardt, and is the musical director for Liverpool based jazz/soul singer Thomas Lang.

If you’re in need of some inspiration to freshen up your blues phrasing or looking to add a little jazz-like colour, John Wheatcroft is back with another blues lesson which will help you broaden melodic, rhythmic and improvisational horizons. In this part we are demonstrating Major Jazz Blues.

If you’re in need of some inspiration to freshen up your blues phrasing or looking to add a little jazz-like colour, John Wheatcroft is back with another series of 3 blues lessons which will help you broaden melodic, rhythmic and improvisational horizons. In part 2 we are demonstrating Latin Blues inspired by Allan Holdsworth, Bireli Lagrene and John Scofield.

If you’re in need of some inspiration to freshen up your blues phrasing or looking to add a little jazz-like colour, John Wheatcroft is back with another series of 3 blues lessons which will help you broaden melodic, rhythmic and improvisational horizons. All 3 parts will include full audio examples (rhythm, solo, backing tracks), PDF and Sibelius tabs and textual explanation with scales and tips.

In the last article of this series we'll see some more superlocrian action. Altered intervals give a functioning dominant chord a greater push along the way to the next change so our superlocrian can be used at this point too. John Scofield and Scott Henderson are both masters at balancing this jazzy tension and release whilst still retaining a strong blues feel to their playing.

Labelled ‘the thinking man’s blues player’, Robben Ford has an original twist on the minor pentatonic. He replaces the customary b7 with the brighter major 6, a note present in the major pentatonic. For this solo study I plumped for Ford’s hybrid pentatonic for all A7 chords.

In this part we’re in Larry Carlton territory for solo 3 and our first look at Vertical improvisation. Larry Carlton is a master at extracting all the juicy notes out of a scale without always running up and down in sequential order.

Does you blues soloing lack the melodic lyricism of Eric Clapton or SRV, or perhaps you’d like to add some slippery, modern dissonance like John Scofield or Scott Henderson? These series of articles explore the various ways you can use the architecture of a chord sequence to really spice up your soloing vocabulary and add an air of sophistication and real authority to your playing.

Following from the previous article, this time we're looking at BB King style of phrasing blues.

Does your blues soloing lack the melodic lyricism of Eric Clapton or SRV, or perhaps you’d like to add some slippery, modern dissonance like John Scofield or Scott Henderson? These series of articles explore the various ways you can use the architecture of a chord sequence to really spice up your soloing vocabulary and add an air of sophistication and real authority to your playing, Nailing the Changes. All solos follow the conventional 12 bar blues format in A, arranged to get more colourful harmonically as we progress. There’s no funny business with the chords, just I, IV, and V. Any inherent ‘Bluesy’ or ‘Jazzy’ feel is a result of the notes selected against the underlying changes. Study the relationship carefully and all of these tones can be at your disposal.