R & B, Blues, Soul Recommended Blues Listening

[PiccoloPirate]

With today's electrics, that allow you to slow down the music, keep it on pitch, or change the key, repeat small sections to learn/memorize, most anything you like to listen to, can be learned.
But, filling the mind with what you hear, does not always get you to be able to compose or even create variations.

The science of the mind, is most interesting, as some kids just get it going early on and others struggle, even though they can read/memorize transcriptions and are able to pick up the tunes and solos off of the audio.
Teaching music for tens of thousands of hours, maybe the answer is to work with psychiatric pharmacologists, extract whatever chemicals the mind creates, to allow those skills, and bottle it.
Miller time, I'll have two Glenns.

 

[JSL]

There is a world of blues - or several. Ask for more focussed direction to converge more quickly.

Chicago blues, KC blues, New Orleans blues, swing blues, jump blues, funk blues, jazz blues, and the list goes on and on. As others have already suggested I'd say start with basic blues shuffles, slow blues, listening to tunes by T Bone Walker, Albert King, B.B. King, etc. and get that 12 bar, I IV V progression firmly implanted in your mind. If you want to play jazz, R&B, R&R, Funk, or blues (obviously) you absolutely have to get the blues down. It's fundamental to all those genres.

Does he strictly mean 12 bar 1-4-5 progressions ? (am assuming 'yes' here)

Next...if OP is just getting feet wet with blues scale improv...perhaps suggestions should veer towards keeping that in mind and suggesting more easily 'consumable' recordings....

+1. And yeah, the blues scale is your friend. Like with any scale, you do have to learn how to use it effectively. Listening to blues players will clue you in on the vocabulary.

"Minor" blues scale: 1 b3 4 b5 5 b7 (minor pentatonic with b5).
"Major" blues scale: 1 2 b3 3 5 6 (major pentatonic with b3).

 

[PiccoloPirate]

Write the lyrics for a tune, that will be a Blues tune, and just send them to your musician friends, and ask them to put it to music.
I did that and received five different styles of music in return.
Decades ago I looked at a buddy, that just went thru a family tragedy, and said to her, "If you only had the Blues, you'd feel better than you do."

That was the opening line, from the lyrics I sent out.
My version evolved from a slow soulful Blues, into a Gospel Blues sermon, of rising up from where Demons can take you.