Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher

Category: Film & Animation

Tags: lead guitar theoryhow to use blues scalesblues scale explainedguitar music theoryhow to improviseimprovise blueshow to use pentatonicsecret guitar teachermusic theoryguitarpentatonic explainednick minnionpentatonicsecretguitarteacherblues theorytheory

Description: Sample Lesson from the Secret Guitar Teacher site: secretguitarteacher.com In this short demo lesson, Nick gives a brief explanation of why the pentatonic or blues scales work so well over a 12-bar blues. He also provides a great tip for anyone who has learned the scale patterns, but just can't seem to make them work when improvising. Abridged transcript: In part three of the Guitar Music Theory Course, available to members of the Secret Guitar Teacher site, there are two full length lessons on the theory of pentatonic scales. But even these two long lessons barely scratch the surface of this subject. In this short lesson today all I want to do is whet your appetite for exploring this subject further. Pentatonic scales are normally learned as a series of box-shaped positions or patterns that look something like this… Learning them this way gets these patterns drilled into your fingers so that you can locate these notes all over the fretboard when learning to improvise over blues or rock progressions. But what are these actual notes and how do they relate to the major scale? Well if we add fret numbers to our box diagrams to pin the notes down to the key of E… we can then give names to all the notes we are playing… and immediately we see that we are covering the fretboard over and over with the same FIVE notes E G A B & D What we like to do in Music Theory is compare everything to the same benchmark and the benchmark generally used is the MAJOR scale. To make the minor pentatonic from the Major scale we leave out the 2nd and 6th notes and move the 3rd and 7th notes down a semitone. So, we say the formula for the Minor Pentatonic is 1 b3 4 5 b7. Now let’s take a look at why this scale works so easily when used over a typical 12 bar blues progression. There are of course many ways to play a 12-bar blues, but most of the time the underlying chord sequence is based on dominant seventh chords, built on the first, fourth and fifth steps of the key scale. In our example key of E, we would use the chords E7 A7 and B7 So perhaps the first thing to notice about the minor pentatonic scale is that it contains all three root notes of these blues chords So if, like many guitar players, you are a little stuck on exactly how to use pentatonic scales over a 12-bar blues, then a good starting point is to target these root notes over the changes like this… Once you have begun to get a feel for how that works, try applying the same idea in each of the five positions of the pentatonic scales and you will quickly find yourself beginning to feel oriented to where these root notes are to be found in each position. You can then branch out and explore how the notes of the scale relate to the other notes in each chord. So, for example, the E7 chord includes the notes E G# B and D (the 1st, 3rd, 5th and flatted 7th notes of the E major scale) The E B and D notes can all be found in our E minor pentatonic scale and the G# note can quite easily be targeted by bending the G note up a semitone like this… The A7 chord comprises the notes A C# E and G. Of these, only the C# is absent from the E minor pentatonic. The others can all be made to work as phrase end notes over the A7 chord. 3 out of 4 of the notes from the B7 chord are accessible from the E minor pentatonic. B and A are directly in the scale and D# is readily available by bending the D note up a semitone. I’d quickly like to stress here that this approach to improvising is only meant as a stepping stone – just a way to get your initial bearings. Once you have developed a bit of confidence that you can play a few phrases that sound right against the changes, its time to cut loose, cast caution to the winds and let your ears dictate what sounds good. So, I’ll play out now with an accelerated view of the gradual progression from this initial ‘play by numbers’ approach to fully improvised blues soloing. See you again next time.