Mike Bloomfield

• Fluid legato phrasing in the Chicago blues tradition — smooth hammer-on and pull-off runs connecting chord tones across the neck
• The Les Paul neck pickup for the warm, vocal lead quality — bridge pickup is too bright and aggressive for this style
• Bending into notes from below — the Chicago blues approach reaches target pitches by bending from a half step or whole step below
• Classic blues licks built from the minor pentatonic with major 6th additions — the "double-stop six" (minor 3rd and 6th simultaneously) is a Bloomfield signature
• The amp should just begin to break up when you dig in — if the amp is clean at all dynamics, the voice is absent. The slight natural saturation provides the "cry"
• Study "East West" from the Butterfield Blues Band — the extended improvisation demonstrates his ability to move between blues, modal jazz and Indian music vocabulary
• Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" solo is the introduction to the style — not fast, not complicated, but every note placed perfectly
• Practise playing the blues scale (minor pentatonic + b5) over 12-bar progressions until the shapes are invisible and the note choices are instinctive
• The vibrato is wide and slow on long notes — the final note of a phrase, held and vibrated until it fades, is the punctuation mark of the Chicago blues phrase

Mike Bloomfield brought the electric blues to white rock audiences — his work with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and on Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" introduced millions to the Chicago electric blues tradition.