“I always say blues isn't about the blues scale or the minor pentatonic scale. It's not scaley music – it's pattern music”: Sue Foley shows you how to stop your blues solos from sounding “scaley”

With 15 albums under her belt, blues guitarist Sue Foley knows a thing or two about crafting bona fide blues solos. In celebration of her latest album, One Guitar Woman, Foley has now revealed her go-to blues lick that still sounds fresh.

“I always say blues isn't about the blues scale or the minor pentatonic scale or anything like that. It's not scaley music. It's a pattern music. So you got to know the patterns to kind of really sound bluesy,” she tells Guitar World.

Foley goes on to demonstrate the lick (at 1:01), which has its roots in early Chicago blues, on her now-iconic pink paisley Telecaster.

“The thing about blues, I always say it's simple. It's not easy, but it is kind of easy to execute these moves. It's just the way you use them and create your own style within that framework, is how your blues playing gets interesting.”

Using the lick as an example, she says that while it's in the minor pentatonic scale, she never approaches it from a scale point of view. Rather, Foley sees it as a pattern.

“The pattern is the A7 chord, right? And I'm just walking from a 7th to a 6th to just a plain A chord. With that very simple pattern, you can go [to] so many places because you could walk your turnaround back from that."

The blues guitarist mentions Muddy Waters guitarists Jimmy Rogers and Louis Myers, Robert Lockwood Jr., and Johnny Winter as key guitar players who mastered the art of walk-ups that cleverly connect parts, without ever sounding “scaley”.

In June, Susan Tedeschi named Sue Foley a guitarist who deserved a signature model but never got one.