Stop-time is an arrangement rather than a new form. The band plays one hit at the top of each bar and nothing else, usually for the first line, and the soloist fills the silence. Every record that uses it does the same thing with it: the fills get bolder as the four bars go by, because there is nowhere to hide.
Four bars of stop-time, then the band
Band · twelve-bar blues in A · shuffle · 84 beats a minute
A band plays the twelve-bar blues in A, shuffled, at 84 beats a minute: A7, A7, A7, A7, D7, D7, A7, A7, E7, D7, A7, E7.
The band hits the first beat of each of the first four bars and leaves the rest to you, then plays through from bar 5. The bass walks each chord from its root: 1, 3, 5, 6, ♭7, and back down.
Play this and listen to what it does to your sense of time. With drums and bass going, the beat is somebody else’s problem; with one hit a bar, it is yours. The hit tells you where bar two begins and nothing tells you where beat three is.
What to play in the gap
Less than you think. A phrase that fills every beat sounds panicked here. Two or three notes with space after them sound deliberate, and the space is what makes the next hit land. Start each fill after the hit rather than on it, so the band and the guitar are not saying the same thing at once.
Aim the last note of each fill at the next hit. The bar is four beats long whether anyone is playing them or not, and arriving with the band is what tells a listener you were counting.
This lesson was drafted with the help of AI, so it may contain a mistake. Its diagrams are drawn by Everyfret’s own software. How Everyfret is made