Stormy Monday by T-Bone Walker Guitar Lesson

Intro solo

As with many blues classics there are multiple recorded versions of this track and in every version T-Bone Walker plays a different solo! So, Jed has taken distinctive ideas from these various versions and used them as a guide to create a T-Bone style improvisation. There are lots of great licks in here, and Jed takes you through four phrases to cover a really authentic intro solo.

Phrase 1

As always, the first thing we need to be aware of is the key in which we're playing. In this song we're in G Blues, which means we can use G major pentatonic, G minor pentatonic and G blues scale, among other things!

The first phrase is based around the G blues scale which looks like this:

Jed takes you through the notes fret by fret, and we highly recommend always trying to be aware of where you are in the scale shape while you work through the video - it's a bit more work but it will serve you really well in the longer term. You may notice that the first phrase doesn't really use that flay 5th in the blues scale, but it'll be showing up soon!

Phrase 2

For the second phrase we're starting with a classic box 1 blues idea, running up the G minor pentatonic scale starting with a bend. This lick was made famous by players such as Chuck Berry, so it might already be familiar to you! Make sure you're getting that first bend in tune and it'll sound great!

Phrase 3

For the second phrase we're still in the same position on the fretboard, using the same G minor framework, but this time we're focusing on just notes from the minor pentatonic scale, so we're leaving out the flat 5 here.

Phrase 4 - altered lick

This phrase comes in over the V chord and is based around an augmented chord. This is also covered in detail in the Blues Essentials series, but it's quite an advanced concept, so for now we'll stick with how it's used in this phrase. If you're not used to this kind of thing it might sound a bit out there, but give it a chance and you might come to love it! This idea is based around three chord boxes, and we're just arpeggiating the chord each time. We go up and down these shapes. Here is that shape for your reference:

Rhythm guitar part

On first listen this sounds like quite a complex guitar part, and it is(!) but we can analyse it a little and really make the whole thing much simpler to understand and then reproduce! First of all we need to look at that chord shape. We're just using one shape for the whole thing, and sliding it up and down so it's worth understanding what's actually going on here. At fist glance it looks like a m7b5 shape, which without context it certainly is, but with the context of the low notes played by a bass player, and the blues progression we're running through we can see that it's actually a dominant 9 chord, but we're not playing the root - the lowest note we play on guitar is the 3rd, and we're leaving the root note to the bass player. Here's a diagram to help:

Once you understand that we can apply it to a blues progression. As we've already mentioned, this song is in G blues. That means we can play the I IV and V all as dominant chords through the progression. We can take the shape above and shift it up and down the neck to get each chord! The chords we're aiming for are G (I) C (IV) and D (V). Just remember we're not actually playing the root note! Here are those main positions on the neck:

As a first task, try to play through the progressing with just these shapes. Don't worry about the chromatic runs up and down until you can feel where each chord is in each bar. The time signature is 12/8 so you have 12 beats on each bar. When Jed counts in on 1 2 3 4 you can think of that as 1 2 3 2 2 3 3 2 3 4 2 3 to help you get a feel for the longer bars.

Chromatic runs

There are various times in this song when you need to play through chromatic chord changes. If you are already comfortable with the whole progression without this part will be much easier to pull off! Just remember that these chromatic shifts are designed to build tension, which is then resolved when we land on the main chord for each bar. This works well when you hit the main chord on the '1' but it might sound off if you're late! Jed takes you through all of these changes in the video, so make a note of in which bar they occur, and which chord you want to be landing on to resolve the tension!

Conclusion

Jed finishes off with a brilliant demonstration of how the lead lines work over the rhythm track. If you have a looper we highly recommend recording yourself playing through the rhythm, then you can experiment with the lead over the top! Good luck with this one and thank you to Jed for breaking it down!