Playing in 1st position in the high register is so much fun! You can play the whole blues scale up there:
7 8’ -9 9’ 9 10” 10
But you can also play the major scale
7 -8 8 -9 9 -10 10’ 10
Since you can play Blues & Major tonalities, this is a great place to play some soul which typically mixes the two, as John Nemeth does in this video.
In another forum post, I shared the tabs for Stevie Wonder’s Boogie On Reggae Woman, which is another great example of this sound.
So any lick you can play in 2nd position in the middle register (from -2 to 6) can be transposed to 1st position in the higher register (from 8 to 10.)
For example this soulful 2nd position Blues lick:
-5 -4 -4’ -3’ -2
Becomes this soulful 1st position Blues lick:
10" 9 9’ 8’ 7
This soulful 2nd position lick, which works equally well in blues, soul, reggae, and country:
-1 2 -2 -3’ -3 -4 5 6
Becomes this soulful 1st position lick:
6 -6 7 8’ 8 9 -10 10
And that’s a little bit about the soulful sounds of position 1 in the high register. Anyone else got some ideas about this subject?