Blues Headlines

Richard Barrett is on a mission to make you a better blues player - with full audio examples and backing tracks

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THE IDEA BEHIND this month's example solo is to try to 'reinvent the wheel' by wilfully ignoring the rich tradition of blues/ pentatonic soloing - which has evolved over decades - and imagine folk, jazz, blues and Celtic music combining as if for the first time in a parallel universe... In theory, this could give a brand-new perspective on vocabulary, tone and so on. In practice, it reminded us a lot of Mike Oldfield!

Mike is best known to many as the composer and performer of Tubular Bells. Though renowned as a multi-instrumentalist, Mike has said that he regards himself primarily as a guitarist, having initially been influenced by acoustic soloists such as John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. However, he was also very struck by the emotive blues-influenced soloing of Free's Paul Kossoff and the electronic soundscapes of Terry Riley. In fact, the more we look into Mike's playing, the more apparent it becomes that he was already going through the thinking process described above back in 1973. He invented something that incorporates elements of all the styles mentioned, with his own take on melody and harmony - plus an unusual violin-style vibrato and fingerstyle technique, even when playing with lots of overdrive.

Mike's amplification setup was similarly unconventional, employing overdriven channel strips, multiple stages of EQ, limiting and noise gates. We're definitely not talking about someone who just went out and bought what everyone else was using!