Blues licks and rock and roll licks: the same notes, and what makes them two different musics

Two guitarists play the same five notes and sound like two records. Almost every guitar lesson about the blues and almost every lesson about rock and roll start in the same place: the minor pentatonic box. The blues scale is the minor pentatonic with the ♭5 added [1], and Chuck Berry built his rock and roll lead on the same five notes in the same positions [5]. If the notes are the same, the difference is somewhere else: in six places, each a pair of cards below:

• The beat is divided differently. The blues plays a shuffle; rock and roll plays straight eighths [3] [4].
• The phrase sits differently. The blues phrase comes in behind the beat and leaves space after it; the rock and roll phrase sits on the beat and never stops [3] [5].
• The bend does a different job. In the blues it is a voice that arrives late and is shaken; in rock and roll it is a staccato hit held against the string above [6] [9].
• The double stops are for something else.
• Repetition means something else.
• One note is added to the box: the ♭5 for the blues, the major 3rd and the 6th for rock and roll.

The first eight lessons make that argument in the minor box. Neither music stays there: B.B. King's box is a mix of the major and the minor pentatonic with the major 6th in it, a happier sound than the minor box [13] [15], and "Johnny B. Goode" is played in the major pentatonic with the minor mixed in [6] [18]. So lessons 9 to 11 ask the same six questions of the major box, one fret below, where the first five come out the same and the sixth does not: both musics add the same two notes there, and the difference is what each does to them. Lesson 12 plays the two boxes at once.

The box holds five notes on four frets. Every lick in the first six lessons is A minor pentatonic at the 5th fret — the root on the low E string at the 5th, two notes a string, nothing above the 8th fret or below the 5th. Its home on the low E puts every line on the G, B and high E strings where both idioms play them, and the whole twelve-bar sits under one hand: when the chord goes to the IV and the V, the box does not move.

Learn the shape over both bands, then play the riff written from it in each idiom straight after. Both riffs are these ten notes and no others, picked plain — no bends, no shakes, no double stops — and they still do not sound like the same music. Through lesson 6 the notes never change and only the playing does; lesson 7 is where each music adds its own note.

The bend arrives slowly, or it arrives on the stroke. Both musics bend the same strings the same distances and mean opposite things by it.

• The blues bend is a singer. It can stop a quarter of the way — the "blues curl", a quarter tone up with a small downward curl of the hand for a vocal element [9] — which is how the ♭3 slides between minor and major without ever arriving [10]; it comes back down; and the vibrato on top is a vocal cry [10].
• The rock and roll bend is a hit. It arrives on the stroke, in tune, and is ended by the next eighth: Berry's staccato bends and two-string unison licks [6].

The unison lick — the same bend held against the root on the string above — is two notes at once, so it is in the next section; here the bend is alone on its string, the fairest way to compare it with the blues one.

The double stop does two jobs. Berry built the lead vocabulary of rock and roll guitar on double stops: pairs a 3rd or a 6th apart, hammered on or bent as a unit. His two-string solos on the top strings gave him a fatter sound [5] [6]. The pairs are not decoration. They are the solo, in eighths, for bars at a time. The ones written here are the 4ths across the top two strings that the app's own rock and roll part is built from [14]. They move between the 5th, 7th and 8th frets, with a 3rd under them to end on.

The unison bend belongs here too. It pushes the ♭7 a whole step up to the root while the root rings on the next string, so it is a bend and a double stop at once, and the double stop is what makes it sound like rock and roll.

The 7th-fret pair arrives before the lesson about it. Its two notes, the 6th and the 9th, are not in the box, and lesson 7 is where they are chosen on purpose. Here they are a shape — the same two fingers, two frets along — which is how a rock and roll player meets them first.

The blues uses the same two strings for the opposite purpose: one pair, struck once, usually with the lower note bent, in the middle of a sentence of single notes. It is the loud word, not the sentence. The pair below is four bars of one pair a bar against four bars of nothing but pairs.

The blues adds one note; rock and roll adds two. Now the notes themselves, and there are only three in the whole course. Each is one fret from a note the hand is already holding.

• The blues adds the ♭5 — the G string's 8th fret — the scale's characteristic tone, a passing tone of friction rather than a dissonance to resolve [1]. It is passed through and never sat on; with it the minor pentatonic becomes the blues scale.
• Rock and roll adds the major 3rd and the 6th — the G string's 6th fret, the B string's 7th — and lands on them: the major–minor shifts of the "Johnny B. Goode" intro [6], the same mixing of the two pentatonics B.B. King does on the blues side [13], used here as an ending.

Every lick so far has been the ten notes of the box, with one exception already played — the 7th-fret pair of lesson 5, whose two notes are the 6th and the 9th arriving as a shape. This is where they arrive as a choice.

Two choruses come out of one box. Twelve bars of each, over the same form, in the same box, taking the lessons in the same order bar for bar, so what you hear between them is the difference and not the material. Every two bars is an exercise you have already played, moved along, with a turnaround written for the last two. After them, the same twelve bars as the app's own parts for each feel with the fill bars left to you: the blues part's stabs and licks, and the rock and roll part's Berry double stops.

After them is a control: the blues chorus with the swing taken away and nothing else changed, over the straight band at 100 bpm. Lesson 2 said the division of the beat was the biggest difference. This card says it is not the only one. The phrases still enter late and leave room, the bends still arrive slowly and are shaken, the ♭5 still passes through, and the phrases still come home to the ♭3, and a listener still hears the blues. Straight blues is a music of its own, from the Chicago records of the 1950s to the Stax records of the 1960s.

The major box holds five notes on four frets, one fret below. A major pentatonic at the 5th fret, the E shape: the root on the low E string at the 5th, two notes a string, nothing above the 7th fret or below the 4th. It is the minor box of lesson 1 moved down one fret, and three of its four frets are the same, so a hand that knows one knows most of the other. The notes are the root, the 9th, the 3rd, the 5th and the 6th. Two of them, the 3rd and the 6th, were the notes rock and roll had to add to the minor box in lesson 7; here they are in the box from the start, on both sides. That is why the blues in this box is the sweet blues, the sound of B.B. King's box with its major 6th [15], and why the lesson about the added notes comes out differently here.

The second figure draws the two boxes together: the root and the 5th are shared, and every other note of the major box sits one fret below a note of the minor box on the same string. Learn the shape over both bands, then play the riff written from it in each idiom, as in lesson 1: plain picked, nothing but the box, and still two musics.

The bends go to the box's own notes, and the box holds every pair. Two of the six differences again, since both are already learned and the box changes what they land on. The major box has two whole-tone bends, and both go to a box note: the 9th up to the 3rd on the G string's 4th fret, and the 5th up to the 6th on the B string's 5th. The blues arrives at them slowly, and its curl in this box is the 9th pushed a quarter tone toward the ♭3 a fret above it, which is how B.B. King mixes the major and minor sounds by how far a bend goes [15]; rock and roll hits them on the stroke and cuts them off, as in lesson 4.

In lesson 5 the 7th-fret pair had to arrive two lessons early, because its notes were not in the minor box. In the major box they are: the 4ths across the top two strings at the 5th fret (the 5th and the root) and the 7th (the 6th and the 9th), and the major 3rd, the root under the 3rd on the D and G strings, are all box notes, and the 3rd is the interval the sources name first in Berry's pairs [5]. The blues pair this box is known for is the 9th bent a whole tone up to the 3rd under a held 5th, one a bar inside a line.

The same two notes, added two ways. A blues scale is a scale with a blue note added: the ♭5 to the minor pentatonic, the ♭3 to the major pentatonic [17] [19]. In lesson 7 each music added its own notes to the minor box. In the major box there is nothing left for rock and roll to add that the blues does not add too: the ♭3, a fret below the 3rd, and the ♭7, a fret above the 6th, and both of them are the minor box's own notes. B.B. King's box holds the first of them [15]. So this lesson is about what is done to a note, not which note.

• The blues bends toward them. The ♭3 is pushed a quarter tone toward the 3rd and held between the two, the mix of major and minor B.B. King makes with the pitch of a bend [15]; the ♭7, "a seasoning, not a foundation" in this box [16], is bent a whole tone up to the root and shaken.
• Rock and roll hammers and strikes them. The ♭3 is hammered onto the 3rd on the beat, the pair "hammered on as a unit" the sources describe [5], the hammer of lesson 7 from the other side of the fret; the ♭7 is struck as the pair at the 8th fret across the top two strings, the ♭7 with the ♭3 above it, the shape the Berry pairs of lesson 5 ended on.

The boxes meet at the 3rd. The minor box's ♭3 and the major box's 3rd are a fret apart on the G string, and every lick that crossed between the two musics in this course crossed there: the blues curling the ♭3 toward the 3rd and stopping, rock and roll hammering it all the way. The same is true a fret apart on every other string. So the two boxes are not two scales to choose between but one hand that reaches a fret either way, and both players the course is written from played like that: B.B. King mixing the two sounds by how far a bend goes [15], and the major-minor shifts of "Johnny B. Goode" [6].

The blues card below is a bar in the major box answered by a bar in the minor box, and then in one bar the 9th bent a whole tone up to the 3rd and the ♭3 a fret above it curled a quarter tone toward the same 3rd, the same note reached from both sides. The rock and roll card hammers the minor box's ♭3 into the major box's 3rd and walks the pairs down from the 8th fret, which is the minor box, through the 7th, which is the major, to the 5th, which is both. After them, a chorus of each in the major box, built the way the minor choruses of lesson 8 were and in the same order, so the four can be played two by two. The 3rd stays over the I in every chorus; over the IV it is that chord's major 7th [16].

The licks were written the way every part in this app is written (docs/STYLES.md, docs/COURSES.md): from the idiom, never from a transcription, and with no signature riff reproduced. Carl Hogan's riff, which Berry used almost note for note to open "Johnny B. Goode" [12], is named as the reference point it is and is nowhere played. The boogie, the twelve-bar, the blues curl, the unison bend and the double stop a 4th apart on the top two strings are the common property of the music.

• Each pair of cards is one list of notes read on two grids: the shuffle's twelve slots to the bar, where an eighth pair is long-short, and the straight sixteen, where it is even. So a pair is identical by construction.
• The course adds nothing to the app's styles. It stands on the Blues shuffle and Rock 'n' roll feels that were already there. It needed one thing the engine did not have, a card that names its own style, and that was added first, with a test.
• The major box was measured on the neck the way the minor one was: the E shape with its root on the low E string at the 5th fret sits on frets 4 to 7, and every pair rock and roll needs is inside it, which the minor box could not say. The licks for it were written fresh for the box rather than translated cell by cell; where a lick's job is the same, it is the same shape moved to the box's cells.
• Every card was realized and read bar by bar against this page and the research with tools/dive-check.js. A test loads the page and holds the claims: the frets of each box, the two grids, the bends and their targets, the strings the pairs sit on, the ♭5 over the I and the major 3rd where it belongs in the minor box, the ♭3 only curled on the blues side and only hammered on the rock and roll side in the major box, the 3rd kept off the IV in every chorus, and the two boxes both used in the last lesson.

Tempos are the app's and keys are as fingered. The prose is written to docs/WRITING.md.