Quick Background
You probably don't know me; I'm not a big deal. At all. I am to my wife and my mom, but that's about it. But I have been playing music in front of people for like 2 decades. Playing lead or soloing is a staple of playing guitar and jamming out in almost every genre of music so of course I've always wanted to do it! I've never had any lessons not because I don't want any - I could never pay for lessons so I had to figure stuff out on my own. Without these lessons, I may get some wording incorrect, but I know that what I have learned is sound. Ha! Happy accident there. I do love my puns, though.
E minor blues scale.
So, here it is. I borrowed a copy of this book: The Heavy Metal Guitar Bible
The Heavy Metal Guitar Bible: The Complete Guide to Modern Heavy Metal Guitar (Learn How to Play Heavy Metal Guitar)https://www.amazon.com/dp/191126799XI did not get far into this book. There is a lot of math involved in music and a lot of memorization, but I ran into the E minor blues scale from this book and started learning this first. I'm glad I did. I started learning this scale in "boxes" which I talk about below - but put my favorites in blue.You can see in the image above the first part is the E minor blues scale. The second image is the A minor blues scale - which is the E minor blues scale moved up 5 frets so that it's in the key of A. If you catch the pattern, you can do this for any key. For instance, you can see the first open note on the big E string in the E scale is on the 5th fret of the big E string making it an A. So, if you move the entire scale from 5 to 3, then the scale is in the key of G.
The third scale there is what you get as an example of googling "E major blues scale" and it contains the Bb (b flat) that is called the "blue note" for reasons I'm not sure of. I have found that you can use spaces in between the notes on my scales pretty fluidly when going from dot-to-dot.
The way I started learning this scale was in the "boxes" I mentioned above. This is a just a term I can use to talk about a grouping of notes on the fretboard. I will probably get around to making some videos to explain better how to begin soloing - quicker if you ask for something too. For the most part, once I started learning these boxes and having them committed to memory - when I'd play other song's solos I realized that the E major blues scale is used just about friggen everywhere. Metallica, Pantera, Steve Vai, The Beatles, Bon Jovi, Alice in Chains, Extreme, Led Zepplin, Steve Miller, Sublime, the list goes on forever. So once I found the thing that everyone seems to use (in various keys) I stopped looking.
Let me know how that works for you!