What does this mean? When someone says licks fit with I, IV or V chords?
If you take a blues in the key of A, the I chord is A, the IV chord is D and the V chord is E.
Then, in the course, Justin will teach some licks that sounds better on the A or on the D or on the E.
So, the advice from UncleGreggy is to write down that information when building your lick book.
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Bingo. We learned some of these concepts in the later stages of BLIM. And I wish I had known them earlier.
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OK.
Where does he teach that?
Well I have a spreadsheet with screenshots pasted in. Does that count?
Is that restricted to the paid course or is this also part of his main lessons?
The premise of this thread (and my original post therein) relates to BLIM, aka Blues Immersion, which is the paid program.
Stuart this is covered towards the end of the BLIM course. But there may also be some references in the Grade 6 Blues modules. However the best way to work this out by ear.
For example in a series of licks in a Quick Blues which would be chord progression
I IV I I
I I IV IV
V IV I V
there is a high probability a lick played over that quick change IV chord, in bold, will suck in a regular 12 BB which is
I I I I
IV IV I I
V IV I V
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Toby. As always thanks for your response & as usual I don’t get it!! See bellow.
OK. Both of those outside my scope at the moment.
That bit I understand but why would a lick played over that quick change IV chord suck in a regular 12 BB? That’s the bit I don’t get! I guess an example of this would help.
Stuart consider you are playing in the key of A and you targeted the note C#. If you landed on that note while on the I chord it would sound good as it’s a chord tone but if you were on the IV chord at the time it would not sound nice. Some notes sound better played over certain chords than others.
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@Richard_close2u Richard can you clean up this thread? Stuart didn’t take the Blim Course and is asking question that are not reliant to the Original post you started.
So that would be using A, D and E for I, IV and V
This is the bit that gets me!! At this point I only know pattern 1 of the A minor pentatonic scale and as far as I know C# isn’t in the scale.
When someone says a lick fits with I, IV, or V chords, they mean that the lick sounds good when played over any of those chords in a key. In most popular music (blues, rock, country, etc.), the I, IV, and V chords are the backbone of a lot of chord progressions. So if a lick works over all three, it’s pretty versatile—you can use it in different parts of a song without it clashing. This usually happens because the notes in the lick come from the key’s scale rather than just one chord’s notes.
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You are right c# isn’t in the A minor pentatonic. If you want to play just A minor pentatonic over the whole of a blues in A, then it’ll work just fine and it’s a great place to start the improvisation journey. However that can begin to sound a bit vanilla after a while. Many licks contain notes that are not in the pentatonic scale, and adding the major third of a chord (c# for an A7 chord) is a very common thing to do, but a lick containing that note needs to be carefully placed - it will sound great over the I chord as the c# is the major third of the A7 chord, it is likely to sound pretty sour over the iV chord as D7 contains a c which will clash with the c#. Similarly there are licks that target chord tones from the IV and V chords and those notes may not be in the pentatonic scale either. Some of these licks might work over other chords but it’s going to depend on the notes used.
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So using A, D and E as a BT I could play any of the licks from this lesson - https://www.justinguitar.com/guitar-lessons/5-blues-licks-from-pattern-1-bl-404
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I think the problem is that I don’t know the notes on the fretboard. I had started learning these (and even bought the Note Trainer app) but was told by not to bother learning the notes. Wish I had carried on! I can work ou the names of the notes but takes a bit of time.
Quite, but where do I go from here?
I only know the licks from the lesson linked in my earlier post to @netahnpaul86 plus a couple more and all are based around the A minor pentataonic!
Don’t know what that means. All a bit double dutch to me 
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Hi Stuart basically dominant seventh chords contain a major 3rd and a b7th. Targeting the major 3rd in your soloing spices up your solos by helping you break out of the pentatonic sound and highlights chord changes. If you play the major 3rd of the A7 chord over the A7 chord it will sound good as it’s a chord tone but if you play the C# over the D7 it will clash with the C note in the D7 chord.
Are you able to improvise over a 12 bar blues with just the pentatonic scale and sound good? If not then I’d suggest working on that first - there’s no rush to worry about chord specific licks until you are comfortable with the ones that stay in the scale.
Also, Justin is found of saying ‘if it sounds good, it is good’. Sometimes the ‘rules’ say something shouldn’t work, but it does.
It might be worth studying some theory if you want to dive deeper into this (the PMT course is great), but a lot of the old blues masters just played what sounded good, they let their ears work it out.
^^^ This. Learning the notes on the fretboard, particularly as you learn the major scale in various positions, is the foundation for just about everything you’re struggling with here.
For example, I, IV, V, etc. refer to notes in the scale, but if you don’t know the scale, or the notes, then that probably doesn’t mean anything to you.
I highly recommend you take the time to go through at least the free portions of Justin’s music theory course - it will be time well spent, and will definitely clear up most if not all of your questions from this thread.
OK. So looking at the chord box below which note is the major 3rd? I’m assuming that the open G is the b7th.
To be honest not really. Just sounds like noise on noise! The problem I have with backing tracks is that I can never work out where beat 1 is so loose track.
I’ve done the first 3 grades of PMT but quite a while ago. Probably need to go over them again.