The blues minor scale is a six-note minor scale. It is built from the pentatonic minor scale, which contains a diminished fifth, or the famous "blue note". It is typically used mainly in the blues (major or minor) but also in plenty of modern Rock and Pop.
To understand how this scale works, firstly you must understand how a minor PENTATONIC SCALE works. Using the A minor pentatonic scale which looks like this:
As tablature you could play it like this:
NB: This pattern works better on ukuleles with a low G string although it will still work with the High G-string, it just won't sound as chronological. These 5 notes will work well creating melodies or solos over songs in the key of C Major or A Minor.
ADDING THE BLUES NOTE
The blues scale contains 6 notes (7 including the octave) and derives from the diminished 5th which can sound mega confusing, but as mentioned previously, just try and go with the patterns for now and practice them before trying to understand the theory behind it.
The diminished 5th appears in the form of an Eb note (which is a diatonic note and can also be read as D# but let's not confuse matters any further just yet) So firstly, lets have a look at those notes with the added blues note:
The diminished 5th appears in the form of an Eb note (which is a diatonic note and can also be read as D# but let's not confuse matters any further just yet) So firstly, lets have a look at those notes with the added blues note:
So you can see that we now have a Eb at position 4 but we still have the D & E notes from the pentatonic scale so the 5th note of D has been diminished by a semitone or half step to give us the extra Eb note. Have a listen to the audio below and play along with the tab to hear what the notes sound like played chronologically. This example is played on a uke with a high G string:
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