This isn’t to say that the guitar’s accompaniment isn’t important! Quite the contrary! How one chooses to accompany a song can make all the difference when it comes to getting the message across and that’s why great guitarists are able to create a wide spectrum of tonal colors and moods with their instruments. They take all the techniques they know, all the stylistic nuances of various musical genres and either select or blend a combination of them to paint a musical background that best suits the song at hand.

Over the course of a few lessons, we’ll take a look at some of the typical styles of guitar accompaniment and try to explore why and how they work. I hope you’ll enjoy these musical excursions! In many ways, if you think about it, almost all our lessons here at Guitar Noise are much more lessons on song accompaniment than on the songs themselves.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

For the time being, I’m going to assume that we’re all relatively familiar with the “strumming as accompaniment” approach. That’s actually a rather large general category and can lead to all sorts of intriguing arrangements by its own right, not to mention when combined with other styles.

So today’s lesson is going to focus almost exclusively on the use of arpeggios and how single note chord arpeggios can create interesting arrangement totally on their own. The use of arpeggios as accompaniment has been around longer than the guitar has and is a technique that most musicians learn early in their playing. You can hear it in songs from all eras of music, from the Animals’ version of “The House of the Rising Sun” to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to Glen Miller’s “In the Mood” (by Garland and Razaf).  We’re going to also combine a little bit of fingerstyle work and a dash of “follow the melody” to add a bit more interest to the lesson.

Probably more important than either of those ideas, we’re going to see how the techniques and lessons we’ve learned from other songs can come into play when making arrangements for other songs. Having the ability to hear opportunities to use all that you’ve already learned in playing guitar is vital is you want to continue to grow and evolve as a player.

We’re going to use an old (very old) Stephen Foster song, Oh! Susanna, and give it a twist straight out of our lesson on Friend of the Devil, if you can believe that! Or you can think of it as putting a Green Day – Wake Me Up When September Ends – sort of spin on it if you prefer. Oh, and you’d better read our Friend of the Devil lesson to get a head start on what we’ll be doing!

Whichever way you want to look at it, we can’t start without examining the song and chord structure of Oh! Susanna first. Purely for convenience, we’re going to play this song in G, since both songs cited earlier are written in that key. Just using the first verse and chorus, here’s what we’ve got:

By the bye, I wrote this arrangement for The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar as an example of why scales were important and how one would go about incorporating scales into their walking bass lines, just like in Friend of the Devil. Now if you’ve gone and done a quick reread of that lesson, you might be shaking your head a bit. The chord progression isn’t the same in both songs, so how are we going to work things out?

Mostly by listening and counting. Much like Friend of the Devil, this verse of this song is broken down into phrases of two measures. Two measures in 4/4 time is eight beats. There are eight notes in the major scale if you count both the starting and ending notes. Who says math isn’t helpful?

Unlike the Grateful Dead song, where we can use an entire G major scale as a descending bass line, Oh! Susanna ends the first and third phrase on a D chord. This means that we really don’t want to follow use the entire scale. But we can use seven notes of it:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

There’s a little slide, which mimics the beginning of the melody, to start things off and then you’ve got a bass and arpeggio combination much like Friend of the Devil. The big difference is that the open B string is hit first instead of the open G string. The bass note moves from G (fifth fret of the D string) to F# (fourth fret) to E (second fret) to D (the open D string). Then the chord changes to C, so you make a C chord but still maintain the same picking pattern the both the initial C chord and then the C with the B in the bass.

Things change up when you get to the open A string. Beginning with the hit of the note of the open A at the start of the third beat in the second measure, play an Am arpeggio straight down the strings until you get to the C note at the first fret of the B string. Then switch quickly to a D chord but play only the D, G and B strings. Technically, this is a “D5” chord, or a “D power chord” if you prefer. But since we’ve used the F# twice now (once in the initial slide and once in the descending bass line), the listener will pick up on this and magically hear the D5 as a D chord. Wild, isn’t it? We’ll also help reinforce this sleight of hand by starting the next phrase with an emphatic slide using the F# note again.

The second phrase of the verse starts out as a carbon copy of the first but things get very different in the second measure:

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Here you reverse the direction of arpeggios starting with the C chord on the first beat of the second measure of this phrase. You follow that up with a three note arpeggio of D and then a five note arpeggio of G (skipping the A string as you pick down the strings).

These two phrases then repeat in order to complete the verse. Here is the full verse:

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Notice the very slight change at the last two beats. We want to make a definitive break between the verse and the upcoming chorus and using a double stop of the G (third fret of the high E string) and B (open B string) notes seems like a good way to do so. This second play through of the verse, by the way, will also serve as the last two lines of the chorus.

And speaking of which, to give the chorus a bit of a different feel, let’s start it out with a simple “contrary motion” Travis style picking pattern, taken straight from our lesson on that topic: Basic Travis Finger Picking Tutorial. For the first two beats, use the C at the first fret of the B string as your high note and then switch to the note of the open high E (first) string for the third and fourth beats.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The last line of the chorus repeats the lyric of the first line of the verse. Musically, it’s a repeat of the second (or fourth) line of the verse. So having the accompaniment repeat the phrase as well makes good sense. But it’s an abrupt shift going from the Travis style that starts the chorus to the arpeggio style of the verse. To make this shift both seamless and musically dramatic, why not do a little melody shadowing, as shown in the last measure of the above example? It creates a nice, natural pause for breath to lead into the last line of the chorus.

And here are the notation and tablature for the entire chorus:

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As I mentioned, this arrangement was written for The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar and, just in case you haven’t heard, Nick Torres did an absolutely wonderful vocal for the CD that comes with the book. If you’d like to have the sheer pleasure of playing backup for Nick, here’s your chance:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope that you have enjoyed this lesson in accompaniment. As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

The Art of Accompaniment was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

And while the answer is positively mundane, it still might help nudge you in a direction that will help you become a better soloist (and player in general).

Are you ready? Here goes:

A scale is not, usually, a solo.

Take a moment to let that sink in before you gasp at how incredibly underwhelming (not to mention obvious) a statement this is. Take a second moment to get over the sarcastic replies that are filling your head as well.

And then think – how do you go about practicing solos? Many guitarists don’t really practice soloing at all. They practice scales and think that they are practicing solos. They will sit and work on getting their fingers to fly around on the fretboard until they are extremely proficient at it and then think that they are soloing. They aren’t. They’re just playing scales or sequences (or series, if you will – and more on that in a moment). Scales can certainly be used in solos and can be (and usually are) an important tool to create a good solo, but they are just one part of the big picture.

At their heart, the great solos we remember are like miniature songs, songs within songs, if you will. And part of what makes them both great and memorable is that they are sing-able. Or hum-able. They have melodies that stick in your head and you find yourself singing them or whistling them or playing air guitar while they’re running around in your brain. Scales are nice but not very exciting as melodies, unless you’re singing Do, Re, Mi or Joy to the World (the Christmas carol, not the “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” song).

Scales move dutifully from one note to the next and we tend to practice them in steady, even rhythms in order to work on our speed. For instance, if we were to work on the C major scale, we’d probably do something like this:

See? Nice and even eighth notes. Maybe we’ll work on sixteenth notes or even thirty-second notes. After all, speed is what we’re interested in, right?

Melodies are interested in phrases and we’ve discussed the importance of phrasing at many points in this series. Just what do we mean by “phrasing?” Phrasing is how a line of music breathes. Take even a simple descending scale, change up it’s timing a little bit and voila! You’ve the first line of the aforementioned Christmas carol:

Even if you don’t play it or sing it, you can see from the different notes (and I’ve written out the counting for you to help you see it) that this isn’t even. It’s full of long notes and short notes and gives both the player and the listener places to take a breath.

Unless you make a deliberate effort to include phrasing and melodies as part of your practice routine when it comes to soloing, your solos are going to sound like the scales you practice. How can they not, since that’s what you’re practicing?

To be fair, a good number of beginners do get this and so they start to vary their practice routine by playing “series” or “sequences” instead of straight scales. A “series” or “sequence” is a slight variation on a scale. You might play the first four notes in order and then back up two notes, like this:

But if you’re observant (and again, you don’t even need to hear this if you’re paying attention), you can see that these are all eighth notes and therefore are all even. This, then, becomes an exercise about speed and not about phrasing. And there’s the trap. If you’re interested, truly interested in solos as solos, at some point you have to stop thinking about speed enough to become a student of melody and phrasing.

And that’s actually very easy, but not in an “easy to practice with a set format” way. It becomes a matter of putting together little melodic bits either from the scales you already know and practice, or from the melodies you can hear in your head while you’re playing.

For example, here’s the descending Am pentatonic, positioned at the fifth fret:

And here’s a very simple, yet elegant blues-style phrase (in swing eighths, so it’s counted out for you) that is basically a slight, incredibly slight, variation on the last example:

The use of the triplet on the second beat, plus the skipping of a note (or two) of the Am pentatonic scale, plus the occasional reversal of direction makes this sound a lot more like melodic, which makes it sound more like a solo.

Next time out, we’ll use a real life song to explore this idea further, but in the meantime you might find it helpful to go over a couple of old Guitar Columns here at on our site that explore what we’ve been talking about: Leading Questions and Picture in Dorian Gray.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief “sidestep” in our series and I also hope it helps you see that even though we often use scales as a starting point to soloing, they are two different creatures and we’re going to have to spend more time practicing making solos, which will help us make our solos sound less like scales. And we’ll tackle just how to “practice soloing” in Part 10 of this series.

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8

Practice With Purpose -Turning Scales into Solos – Part 9 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

And all of this often occurs long after making the decision as to which guitar to buy in the first place!

Without knowing it, a beginning guitarist can make a choice of instrument that may hinder his or her progress as a player. This is true of all guitars, whether electric or acoustic but in this article we’re going to focus on one particular aspect of the acoustic guitar and that is its body shape.

Most people typically divide guitars into two classes – acoustic and electric. “Acoustic” in this particular case simply means “not electric,” which can get a bit confusing when talking about classical guitars or “electric-acoustic” models.

It has become more a convention these days to think of guitars in three distinct types – classical guitars, acoustic guitars and electric guitars. There are, of course, exceptions, not to mention many different “sub-categories” within each type.

For our discussion, we want to think of “acoustic” as “metal string flat-top guitars that do not require amplification.” “Acoustic” is certainly a lot easier to say than all that! Acoustics differ from classical in one main aspect. The strings of a classical guitar are nylon while acoustics are metal.

But it’s also important to realize at this point that acoustics have many shapes. When someone says “acoustic guitar,” we may have a general picture in our head but we don’t always give that picture a distinct shape.

Most acoustic guitars are what are called “dreadnought” style. Here is a photo of both a classical guitar (on the left) and a dreadnought style acoustic (on the right):

Classical guitars are direct descendants of the first six-string guitars that began to appear at the very end of the 1700’s. Besides having nylon strings, they are usually slightly smaller than typical acoustic guitars,  particularly the dreadnought style. Classical guitars usually have a wider fingerboard and slightly shorter necks. The fretboard joins the body at the twelfth fret instead at the fourteenth, as most acoustics do.

You can see that, compared to the classical guitar shape, the dreadnought is bigger and boxier. Its “hips” are not as defined, the body is more rectangular than rounded. It’s like someone was trying to carve out a classical guitar body but didn’t have the confidence to make it come out as curvy so he played it safe.

The dreadnought body is also usually a bit deeper. This is very important because this added depth, combined with the general boxiness of the dreadnought can make it difficult for a beginner to hold comfortably. Particularly when you take into account that the beginner is often going to try to tip the fretboard of the guitar upward in order to peek at his or her fingers!

For smaller people and for people with shorter arms, and for many women, a dreadnought style guitar is simply uncomfortable to hold. It digs into their arms when they reach around to strum and they can’t always get good position with their fretting hand to cleanly finger the notes they want to play.

But if you go into a music store, chances are very likely that more than half (and probably up to ninety percent) of the guitars they have to offer are going to be dreadnoughts. Obviously, you might think that you have to settle for one. Don’t. If you find holding a guitar uncomfortable, regardless of what type of guitar it is, first ask a friend or a salesperson if you’re holding it correctly. Don’t by shy about this. After all, if you’re going to buy a guitar you want it to be a good fit for you.

If you’re still having problems with the dreadnought, ask to check out a classical. Even if you don’t have any intention of buying one! The object here is to examine the fit, to see whether or not the size and shape of the classical makes it easier for you to hold and strum the guitar. Chances are likely (again, if you’re female or have small arms) that you will find the classical shape more to your liking.

And, fortunately, they do make acoustic guitars in similar sizes and shapes. Depending on the manufacturer, these can be called “folk” or “auditorium” or “parlor” style guitars. Here is a photo that shows you a “folk” style (on the left) with both the dreadnought (center) and the “jumbo” style:

Notice that the folk style guitar has dimensions very similar to the classical guitar from the previous photo. It is both smaller and have more distinct curves than the dreadnought. Also like a classical guitar, these smaller styles tend to have a more balanced sound (dreadnoughts, as a rule, are boomy and a bit bass-heavy) and finger style players usually love them when compared to a dreadnought. But they certainly can be strummed like a “regular” acoustic.

The jumbo sized guitar (shown on the right) is almost like a cross between the folk, or auditorium style, and the dreadnought. It’s curvy but big and deep. A number of manufacturers now make what they’re calling “mini-jumbos,” which have the same shape as the full jumbo but are more the size of a folk or auditorium style.

When at the music store, check around to see if they have other types of acoustic guitars besides dreadnoughts for you to try out. Nowadays more stores are trying to keep a number of “non-dreadnought” style guitars in hand to accommodate players who either want a different sound or need a guitar that is a better physical match for them in terms of size and shape.

This may seem like more work than you’re interested in doing, especially since you’re first starting out on guitar. But you wouldn’t believe how many people start playing and then stop because of frustration in getting clean and clear notes. And in more cases than one will probably admit, the culprit is not the novice guitarist, but rather the guitar that he or she is trying to learn on. Someone may inherit a guitar or be given a guitar and of course you want to learn on it. The last thing you want to hear is that your guitar is keeping you from learning. That may mean investing in a new guitar and then what if you don’t like playing?

This is why it’s important to try out different sized and shaped guitars as soon as you discover you’ve an interest in playing. It doesn’t mean that you have to go right out and buy a different guitar, but it does help you discover that, yes you can play a C chord on a guitar that fits your shape.

Talk with your friends that play and also talk with the salespeople at your local guitar shops. They want you to be comfortable with your guitar and will usually help you try out a number of different types (provided they have them).

Even if you’ve decided to buy a guitar through the Internet, go to your local shop to try out different styles of guitars so that you are aware of which ones fit you best. When you’re buying a guitar off the Internet, be sure you know what style and size it is. The research you’ve done by going to shops will help minimize the chances of you getting a guitar that doesn’t fit you. Above all, know what the return policies are wherever you purchase a guitar, online or no.

Think about this – you don’t run a race wearing dress shoes or sandals. You don’t even train to run a race in shoes other than those you’ll run in. Likewise when it comes to playing guitar, try to find the one that best fits you physically. It will help you get through the early phases of learning the instrument with less frustration. Although you’ll still look like a bobble-head doll from time to time!

Peace

The Shape Of Your Acoustic Guitar was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

That may seem like a strange thing to say, but there are many places along one’s journey of learning the guitar where one eyes can actually make learning more difficult. Actually, it’s not really the eyes as much as it is the perceived (and pre-conceived) need to see.

“But,” you say, “what about if you’re a visual learner?” That is something that teachers hear over and over again these days. And while is it true that some people do learn quicker through a visual medium (and it’s exceedingly strange how reading, which is totally visual, seems to have fallen through the cracks and is no longer considered a “visual medium”), most people brains are, fortunately, quite adaptable and can switch gears quicker than one realizes. More on this later as it’s very important.

More to the point, though, is that music is not a visual medium, now matter what kind of spin you try to put on it. Music is heard or even felt as vibrations, but unless you go to concerts carrying a lot of sophisticated scientific equipment with you, you don’t see it. You can see all the peripherals of the show – the set, the lights, the costumes, the seemingly endless visual effects – but that is not the music. It’s the show and it’s important to remember that the two are separate.

When you play your guitar you also do not see the music. You see yourself playing the instrument. And, despite what I initially said, very important to beginners. Playing the guitar requires a bit of coordination. You need to correctly fret a note, which means that you have to be fretting the correct string in a “sweet spot.” You also have to pick the right string, too! Imagine doing that without looking!

But as one learns the guitar, this need to look at what the hands are doing can have some adverse effects. First off, in order to see your fingers on the frets, you have to tilt the neck of the guitar at an angle toward you. This creates two problems: First, with your guitar at that much of an angle, you’ve placed it in such a way that you cannot get the tips of your fingers in an optimal position to fret the notes. The angle dictates that the fingers are more flattened than “on point,” which increases the likelihood that you’re going to blunt some of the adjacent strings even if you do manage to fret the note you want.

Having the guitar tilted so that you can see the neck also places your wrist in a very awkward place. Ideally, you want your wrist to be relatively straight when you’re playing. There’s no way you can get it close to straight when tipping the neck to favor your eyes.

As a beginner, you have a fine line to walk here. Initially you are going to have to see what you’re doing. But you want to develop confidence in your fingers as soon as possible so that you don’t have to rely on your eyes to know they are sitting on the right place on the fretboard. This is why so many teachers first walk students through the many variations of the “one finger one fret” exercises when starting out. It helps to build that confidence and also makes you realize that you don’t have to see where your fingers go all the time.

Just as important, these simple exercises work to start developing your ear as well as your sense of touch. With very little concentrated practice, it’s amazing how quickly one can both hear and feel when a note is wrong. And this becomes more important as you get more serious about your playing.

So if you’re just starting out, make it a habit to try to set your guitar straight, parallel to your upper body, just as soon as you can. Read any of Jamie Andreas’ articles and you’ll understand the importance of proper posture and position. Look at your fingers first and then set your guitar right and try to go by feel. Some people practice sitting in front of a mirror to help with being able to see. That’s okay, too, but again the point is to try to play without looking. After all, if you perform live you’re not going to be playing in front of a mirror! Yes, playing without looking will certainly be difficult at first, make no mistake about it.

But in the long run it will also make your learning easier. Whenever you run into a chord that you’re having difficulty fingering, merely setting yourself in good position, getting the fingers where they can optimally fret the strings can usually make a huge difference in playing a chord well. Not to mention cleanly!

Changing chords is another area where our eyes can slow us down. Not that they mean to do so, but when one watches ones fingers change chords the natural tendency is to slow things down and to have each finger work individually in order to better follow it with the eyes. It’s almost as if the fingers and eyes have a contract between them to make the signal to the brain better – “…first remove index finger and stretch it to the first fret and put in place, then remove ring finger…”

Ultimately, you want your fingers to work together as a unit to change chords (see Tom Hess’ excellent article Teaching Chords to Beginning Guitar Students for some tips on doing so) and not relying on your eyes to supervise your chord changes will make you quicker and also more confident about your abilities. Not to belabor the point again, but you are far more likely to develop both your ear and your sense of touch more quickly once you push yourself to the point of not watching your every move.

And developing both your ear and your confidence in your fingers are two important by-products of getting past using your eyes. Read any interview by any guitarist whose ability and skills you admire. When he or she talks about learning it’s inevitably about how he or she would listen to his or her own idols and then try to play what was heard. The interviews rarely delve into just how much work that involved, it’s almost as if the interviewer has no idea how much time was spent getting things wrong! That’s important to think about, because ear training takes work, and if you never set aside time to practice using your ears, you won’t get a sense of phrasing or rhythm that are essential to being a great lead guitarist.

Speaking of rhythm, how many guitarists do you know who describe beats in terms of “ups and downs?” And how many do you know who count out the beats? Generally speaking, which ones have you found to have a better sense of rhythm? Chances are likely it’s those who count. When you count out rhythms you internalize them. You feel them. You cannot feel “up and down,” you can only copy a motion you’re seeing. It may be that watching someone gets you started, but until you develop the ability to internalize a rhythm you’re always going to need someone to get you started.

Please understand, none of this is to say that I don’t think using your eyes isn’t important or that being a “visual learner” means you’ve no chance of becoming a musician. All that I’m trying to teach you is to not let a convenient label keep you from making real progress on the instrument you love making music that means the world to you.

Our brains are incredibly wonderful and yet intensely dangerous things. They are wonderful in that we ultimately learn about the world using all our senses. And we truly need to use all our brain whenever possible. Most of us can smell something burning long before we see it, just to use an everyday example.

The brain is dangerous when we talk ourselves into a handicap that we don’t necessarily have. Saying “I am a visual learner” or “I need to see my fingers to play” takes all the pressure off, so I don’t have to worry or work harder when I stumble. More importantly, if I say it enough my brain will believe it and I’ll never be able to prove it otherwise, even if I manage to get good in spite of myself. If I say instead, “I prefer to learn visually but this is a musical instrument so I’m going to have to work on being able to use my fingers and my ears as well as my eyes, maybe even instead of my eyes” then I am letting my brain know that I need its help to coordinate all my abilities so that I can make music.

Way too many guitarists end up giving up playing because they don’t use all the abilities their brains have access to. It doesn’t take a genius to see that.

Speaking of seeing, here’s a final thought – as you get more serious about playing and start performing either solo or as part of a group, or even if you simply just jam with some friends, you’re going to need your eyes both to communicate and to catch communications with your band mates and audience. You’ll totally miss out on that if you have to constantly keep watch on your hands.

Until our next Guitar Column…

Peace

The Ears Have It was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

This becomes very important when you encounter more complicated rhythms, as you’ll soon see. But I’d like to take a moment to clue you in to something that will also help you immensely when it comes to playing rhythm – written music notation. Notes written in musical notation do double duty. They tell you which note to play and they also tell you how long any given note should last in terms of beats.

Tablature is certainly helpful, but usually only to a point. For example, take a moment and play this for me:

You certainly can handle the notes themselves, but notes are only one part of music. Rhythm is another and it can be very important. How important? Well, suppose I tell you that the example you just played is the first line of the Christmas carol Joy to the World? Did you play it like that the first time? Or did you play it simply, giving each note a single beat? Quite a difference, no?

Since we’re truly only concerned with strumming (for now, anyway), you only have to concern yourself with reading the rhythm aspects of notation. We’ve a number of lessons here at Guitar Noise about this, like Timing is Everything. You might want to take a few moments to look that one over, particularly since it gets into counting and that’s right at the heart of what we’re discussing.

When you count out the beats of the song, you usually do so in terms of quarter notes. We did this in “Example 1″ in Part 1, where you strummed down each quarter note like this:

I’d like to take a moment now to introduce some of you to rhythm notation. Rhythm notation uses just the rhythm part of notation. Instead of writing all the notes of a chord out in notation, a simple slash is stuck at the end of a stem, like this:

These are four quarter notes of the G chord, just as you saw in “Example 2″ a few moments ago. It doesn’t matter in the slightest where on the staff, on whichever line or space, the slash appears. All you’re concerned with is that they are quarter notes. Many music books use rhythm notation without staffs, placing strumming notation above a lyric line.

We’ll use rhythm notation for our next few examples. I’m not going to bother putting a chord in the following examples so you should feel free to use whatever chord you’d like.

Getting back to our quick review of “Part 1,” you also read and saw how when you strum in quarter notes, you’re actually strumming in eighth notes when you take the upstrokes into account:

So far, so good. Now how about if you want to play some more complicated rhythms, maybe something in the style of Jack Johnson, perhaps? He’s actually a great choice because most (if not all) of his music is available in books, which means you don’t have to guess how he strums things, it’s all written down for you!

You may be wondering how that is possible. After all, no one probably went and marked every downstroke or upstroke on the notation. And you’d be perfectly right about that. But if you take a moment and apply your brain, using the information you got in “Part 1,” you’d make some important discoveries.

Suppose you want to play a rhythm where the fastest notes are sixteenth notes? First, you have to think about strumming in eighth notes. Why? Because sixteenth notes are half the value of eighth notes, just like eighth notes are half the value of quarter notes. So if you were to strum a measure of eighth notes with all downstrokes, like this:

That means you’d be strumming in sixteenth notes when you take the upstrokes into account, like this:

Of course, more likely than not, you’re not going to be overly challenged by a rhythm that is either straight eighth notes or straight sixteenth notes. The fun comes when things get a little uneven, such as in strumming something like Jack Johnson’s song, Taylor.  Here’s the riff that gets played pretty much throughout the song:

This looks kind of formidable unless you are able to see it and say, “Hey, that’s all sixteenth notes! Some of them have ties, but they are all sixteenth notes and I can do that!” First, chart all the notes out and ignore the ties. Since the two measures of this riff have the same rhythm, I’m going to just use the first one in the next two examples:

Now, when a note is tied, that means you just play the first of the tied notes and not the second. That means that we miss whatever strum happens to fall on the second of the tied notes, like this:

Instead of the rhythm and the strumming being a total mystery, you’ve got it down perfectly. Let’s try the whole riff:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

That wasn’t hard at all, was it? Not to figure out, anyway! Executing the strumming correctly will take a bit of practice, but nothing you aren’t capable of.

In the chorus sections of Taylor, a second acoustic guitar part comes in playing some open position chords while the first guitar is playing the riff we just worked out. Here is how the strumming of the second guitar looks in notation (rhythm notation this time):

By the way, I’m going to use a regular open position G instead of the “G5″ if that’s okay with you. I just like the sound of it better. Following the same process we just used for the first guitar part, we notice that there is a combination of eighth notes and sixteenth notes here. First, we want to just write out the count, and here’s something very interesting about that – It seems that many notation software programs, particularly those used in guitar books, usually separate out the groups of sixteenth notes or eight notes or dotted eighth and dotted sixteenth notes and what have you, in clusters of single beats. This makes writing out the count a lot easier, as you can see:

Finally, just add in our upstrokes and downstrokes according to where they fall in the count and you’re good to go:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You’ve gotten quite a bit to digest here, so we’ll save going into even more complicated rhythms for next time.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Getting Past ‘Up and Down’ – Part 2: “Turning Notes into Strokes” was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Today we’re going to look at little harder at how we choose a scale to use as a solo. And, hopefully, we’ll see that there can be more than meets the eye.

To make this lesson somewhat practical and useful, why don’t we use a typical rock ‘n’ roll chord progression? How about C to Bb to F to C, say four beats (one measure) each? You can go ahead and give the final MP3 file a listen if you’d like, just to get a handle on what we’ll be working on.

You can hear that C major is definitely what we’d call the tonal center. But is it the key of this progression? We can certainly make an argument for it, and chances are, if you were looking at sheet music for something like this (maybe Bachman Turner Overdrive’s Taking Care of Business, for example) the key signature would indicate C major by having no sharps or flats and adding the Bb to the Bb chord by means of accidentals. You can also find a surprising number of books where a chord progression like this would be written out in the key signature of F, which has one flat (Bb). But C is certainly our center, our sense of “home,” if you will.

Okay, so we have a key. One step down and several decisions to go…

This particular progression, going from the root (I) to the flat seven (bVII) to the four (IV) chord, is very common in rock music. Without batting an eye, you could probably come up more than a dozen songs you know that use it in one form or another. You’ll also find this chord progression in country and folk and even in some guitar studies by the immortal Fernando Sor, which means that people living around 1800 were not strangers to these sounds.

Thinking in terms of the typical rock guitarist, we might automatically reach into our “toolbox” and pull out the C major pentatonic scale. In case you’ve forgotten (even though it’s not been all that long since we used it last!), the notes are C, D, E, G and A.

Looking at the make up of the chords in the chord progression, we find the following:

C major contains the notes C, E and G

Bb major contains the notes Bb, D and F

F major contains the notes F, A and C

While the major pentatonic is not going to cause us a lot of stress, there aren’t a lot of nice target notes from which to choose. By “nice,” in this case, I’m talking about root notes of the chords. There’s C (and E and G, too), but no Bb or F. We do have the D (the third of the Bb chord) and A and C (the third and fifth, respectively, of F). You could use this scale but you will probably find yourself unhappy with how it ultimately sounds. Don’t take my word for it. Since you’ve downloaded the last MP3, give it a try and then come back to the discussion.

Alright, then, the C major pentatonic was a bust, so let’s try the C minor pentatonic. I’m sure you remember this one:

Because we’ve given a very nice rock feeling to this chord progression, using the blues idea of “Minor pentatonic over a major key” works pretty well here. Have a listen:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

We’ve got blue notes Eb (flat third) and Bb (flat seventh) to play over the C chord, and there’s Bb (root) and F (fifth) of the Bb chord and also F (root), C (fifth) and Eb (flat seventh) for the F chord. All and all, this doesn’t do that bad of a job.

Can we do more? Certainly, we can. Take a look at all the notes of our chords again, this time written out as they would appear in a scale:

C D E F G A Bb

Does this look at all familiar? Except for the last note (Bb), everything else is a note of the C major scale. There is, of course, one major scale that has only one flat in it, and that is the F major scale. You’re probably more familiar with it if we start on the root:

F G A Bb C D E

How about that? Of course, you’ve already read A La Modal or any of our other Guitar Noise lessons on modes, so you know that when we use the F scale but start out on the C note, it’s technically the C Mixolydian Mode. And in root six position on our guitar we’ll find it here:

This is an interesting mix because it gives us more target notes, but eliminates many of the “blue notes” because we’re using E instead of the Eb of the C minor pentatonic. Consequently, you get a markedly different feel when using the C Mixolydian, as evidenced here:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Interesting, isn’t it? Even though we’ve got the same progression and I’m using the same style to solo with, this has more of a pop feel and less of the blues edge to it. Many rock guitarists find the Mixolydian mode fits very well into quite a lot of their music.

Of course, you can always decide to “mix and match,” using the C minor pentatonic for a phrase and then switching off to the C Mixolydian for another. But for those of you who enjoy playing one single scale, then I would ask you to think back just two lessons ago in this series and perhaps consider the C Dorian scale, which would be a C scale, only in the key of Bb (which has two flats, Bb and Eb):

Here you’ve got the two blue notes of the C minor pentatonic, plus you’ve got the Eb as a blue note for the F chord, but you still get all three notes of the Bb and F major chords as you did with the C Mixolydian. Here’s what a solo in this scale sounds like:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You might notice on this solo that I went out of my way to use the D note as a target to make things even more interesting. D on top of the C chord makes Cadd9, and over F creates F6. It is, of course, the third in a Bb chord.

And, as always, I cannot stress enough that these are still only a few of the possible choices available to you, not even counting combining scales, as mentioned just a few paragraphs ago.

And, again as always, this is why it’s vital for you to take the time to experiment and noodle and, most important of all, to listen to what you’re doing so that you can get a feel for what you want and when you want it. Here is a backing track so that you can practice the scales we mentioned, plus any other scales or combinations of scales you might find intriguing:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this and I hope that you are starting to get (or getting more of an idea) that there will almost always be a multiple choice answer to the eternal question of “which scale should I play!”

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7
• Practice With Purpose – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 9

Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

This one came a little while back via email:

Dear David,

I love your site – and your lessons and your arrangements and ideas for changing the keys of songs and different rhythms to try. I was inspired to buy a twelve string by your article “Double Your Pleasure” and I listen to your great podcasts. As experimentation is something that seems to inspire you as it does me, I wondered if I could ask for your input with something I am working on and not many people seem to be able to help me with…

I love the rather simple song “All I Can Do Is Write About It” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. But as I’m Scottish and now living in America, I thought I’d change a few of the words to make the song about Scotland rather than the American south. Then I also thought to make it sound a bit more Celtic, it might be worth putting into DADGAD…

The chord progression is really simple: G D C; G D Em C, G D C C.

Do you think I can just play those chords in DADGAD or if I retune to DADGAD is there an equally good sounding progression or a transposed set of chords that you have experience with that would sound better in that tuning – while obviously keeping the same rhythm and feel as the original…just with a Celtic twang, if you will…

Your thoughts would be gratefully recieved…

Now it’s been ages since I’ve heard this song, which if I remember correctly is the closing number off Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Back My Bullets album, and the idea not only intrigued me but it seemed like a cool thing to do for Saint Patrick’s Day (although I’m not sure I’m going to make it by then!). So I sat down and worked up some ideas and here is a quick lesson that came out of that bit of brainstorming. Of course, we’ve got to go through the usual formalities:

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

First things first, as mentioned in the email, the song is indeed very simple in terms of structure and chords. Not counting the solo between the second and third verse, there are two different sets of two-measure chord progressions. The first, which we’ll call “Progression A” is two beats each of G, D, Em and C. The second set, “Progression B” if you will, is two beats each of G and D, followed by four beats of C.

Pairing one “Progression A” with one “Progression B” will give you two lines of the first verse, as you can see here:

The introduction of All I Can Do is Write About It is also made up of one pair of these two progressions. Immediately following the first half of the first verse, “Progression B” is then played by itself, serving as a short interlude between the two halves of the first verse (you could technically call these two separate verses – that’s up to you).

The chorus of the song, as well as all the subsequent verses follows a different structure. First you play “Progression B” twice, then “Progression A” and then you tack on one last “Progression B” to finish things off. Here’s the way the chorus parses out:

The very last time the chorus is played, the final line ends with a single Em chord, played once and held instead of playing the full measure of C. And that pretty much takes care of both the chords and the song structure.

And that means it’s time to tackle the chords. I assumed (correctly it turns out, and that’s fortunate because otherwise we’d be having a chat about that word “assume”) that the reader wanted to play and sing this song at the same time, so instead of going for full chords, I went with embellished chords that (a) were relatively easy to finger and (b) allowed access both to open strings as well as potential hammer-ons and pull-offs that would help give the song that “Celtic twang” the reader was looking for.

My thinking was this – in order to sing and play the song at the same time, you’re going to want to have an arrangement that you can play pretty much on auto-pilot. The less you’re worried about the playing, the more you can enjoy the song and also come up with all sorts of other trills and frills.

So here are the chords, displayed both in chord charts and guitar tablature:

Having the chords and the structure, all that was left was to come up with a Celtic feel to playing the chords. If you’ve read A Celtic Air, one of the old Guitar Columns here at Guitar Noise, you know that there are many aspects to giving an arrangement a Celtic feel. Being tuned in DADGAD is one way of doing that, but using a lot of droning notes, not to mention a generous helping of hammer-ons and pull-offs, also can help.

But if you’ve ever listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s original version of this song, or to any song of Skynyrd’s for that matter, you know that their guitarists are constantly using hammer-ons and pull-offs. It’s part of their signature sound.

So we have to come up with something else, and I chose to go with rhythm. Most Celtic pieces have a swing to them; it’s rare for a reel or jig to not have a triplet feel. Yes, this will make our arrangement of the song a little more difficult, but it will also make it feel a lot more Celtic and less Southern Rock Ballad.

In order to do this, I re-arranged the time signature of All I Can Do Is Write About It, going with 6 / 8 timing instead of 4 / 4. This gives us an intrinsic triplet feel. It’s all a matter of the “pulse” of a song. Normally, we think of 4 / 4 timing as having the following sense of pulse:

In 6 / 8 timing, our pulse is gotten by counting the beats in the following manner:

In 6 / 8 time, even though each eighth note technically gets a beat, the convention is to think of the dotted quarter note (which is made up of three eighth notes) as the pulse, giving each measure two pulses that can, in turn, be neatly divided into three. This is why when you see a song in 6 /8 timing, the BPM will usually indicate the dotted quarter note getting the BPM count and not the eighth note or quarter note. In other words, you get one triplet set for each click of the metronome.

And because we’re looking at chord changes that take place every two beats, I want to subdivide the pulse even further, mostly in order to give myself more room in which to play:

Here we’re using three sixteenth notes (and not sixteenth note triplets, as I say on the first MP3 files – good help is so hard to find!) for each half-beat, giving up six sixteenth notes to play around with when we get ‘round to creating our riffs, which should be any moment now…

I hope you’ve followed along with me this far, because now we’re getting to the fun part! Since there are only four chords, all we have to do is come up with a cool, Celtic sounding pattern for each of our chords. For whatever reason, when I was working this out I was using a pick. It just happened that way. So you can definitely play this with a pick (and I do in the MP3 sound files), or use your fingers if you prefer. Here’s what I came up with for the G chord:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

For the fingering, I suggest using your middle finger on the sixth (now low D, as we’re in DADGAD tuning) string, while your ring finger plays the regular D (fourth) string and the index finger handles the chores on the G (third) string.

I came up with this particular pattern after a bit of playing around. Giving it a bit of breathing space, that is, not filling it entirely with sixteenth notes, made this seem, to my ears anyway, as fairly playful and slightly mysterious and also allowed for no end of possible variations (one of which you can see and hear in the last example) should I really get into things. That’s important to me. If I’ve a pattern that has to be played precisely in sequence for the duration of a song, chances are very likely I’m going to botch it at some point. So having a pattern that can be slightly scramble on occasion is a big plus as it allows me freedom to screw up and still carry on with the song.

And having a little bit of space where I could add in more sixteenth notes, again as you hear on the variation, means that the number of possible variations can be quite high.

For the D chord, I could have gone with many other options, but I liked this one best:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Mostly, I enjoyed using the hammer-on of the F# on the D string. There’s a big tendency, when playing in DADGAD, to use D5 chords instead true D chords. Making this one a little more embellished by adding the B and G notes on the G (third) string appealed a lot to me for some reason.

Now let’s look at a pattern for the Em chord;

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As with the G chord, I added a single variation to this particular pattern, but there are even more possibilities with the Em than with the G, especially with this fingering. You can get many more notes, from the low B at the second fret of the A (fifth) string to the E note at the second fret of the first (now high D) string. You should play around a lot with this pattern, as you should with the C:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, I cannot stress enough how you should make the time to experiment and try to come up with your own variations. I choose these particular patterns by thinking, “what could I play and still manage to sing this song at the same time?” and your answer will (hopefully) be a little different than mine.

And you will hear that, when playing this without thinking too much about it, I ended up with even more variations than I’d planned. Please notice that I ended this final MP3 file with a simple G 6 / 9 chord (550000 in DADGAD) simply because, at the time of recording this, I wasn’t even aware that I was going to write a whole lesson around what I came up with! Using Em7 (220020) or even leaving the second (A) string open (220000) will work as well.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

In the original recording, there is a solo before the last verse, played after a brief change to the key of A. The chords are A (two beats), D (two beats) and E (four beats) and this progression is played four times. For our arrangement, I decided to simply leave out the solo. Maybe the next spot of spare time I get I’ll come up with something and then update this lesson!

I hope you had fun with this lesson on arrangements. It’s a lot of fun, not to mention occasionally challenging, to come up with an arrangement that’s different enough from the original yet still pays homage to the sentiment of the song. And it’s always a treat to hear people come up with arrangements because it can be a real eye (and ear) opener that inspires you to get a little more creative.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forum page or email me directly at either dhodge@guitarnoise.com or dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Lynyrd Meets DADGAD – A Celtic Arrangement of “All I Can Do Is Write About It” was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

You may not think that lead guitarists have to concern themselves with rhythm, but you’d be dead wrong. Rhythm sets up the whole concept of phrasing and phrasing is what makes a solo sound like a solo and not someone practicing a scale.

And now this bit from the fourth lesson, Combining the Major Scale with the Minor Pentatonic:

…let’s take a brief step sideways to think a moment about what makes music interesting. At its heart, music is a constant shift between disharmony and harmony, what’s generally referred to in terms of “tension and resolution.” Good melodies, for example, don’t simply use notes taken from the chords of the chord progression of a song. It’s the interplay of the melodic notes against the chord progression that creates this give-and-take of tension and resolution.

Solos do this as well. Otherwise all soloing would be nothing but chord arpeggios. And we would be reading a lesson on “Turning Arpeggios into Solos” and not “Turning Scales into Solos!”

Alright then, let’s chat about “target notes.” And to do that, I’m going to quote Guitar Noise Moderator Wes Inman, who recently made a great post about this concept on the Guitar Noise Forum:

I am a big believer in “target notes.” This is when you pick specific notes to play over specific chords in your progression. I don’t like to play notes nilly willy; I like the solo to lead the listener’s ear. This is a method that will help you pull off a good solo every time, but it is not something you want to do every solo. You don’t want to sound like you are using a method. So, think of it as a tool. Once you get familiar with these target notes, you will remember them when you are improvising.

Now I’d like you to do me a favor. You’re going to use the same chord progression that served as our “backing track” in the first two lessons on this series (C to Am to F to G) and improvise a little solo, using the C major pentatonic scale. For those of you who may have forgotten it, here are the notation and tablature to help you out:

Chances are likely that when you’re playing this, you don’t run into a lot of tension or dissonance. That’s one of the reasons why the pentatonic scale is such a popular tool for a soloist. Remember that the notes that make up these chords are as follows:

The notes of the C major pentatonic scale are C, D, E, G and A. That gives you all three notes of the first two chords in our progression – C (C, E and G) and Am (A, C and E), plus two notes each of the F chord (A and C) and G chord (G and D). These notes, when played over the chords which they are a part of, are your safe notes.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg, if you’ll pardon the cliché. And this is also where having either a little chord theory or a lot of listening experience will come in handy. You might know from your own reading or experience, or by availing yourself of the many wonderful articles here at Guitar Noise, that you can add just about any note to a major or minor chord and come up with an embellished chord, such as a sixth or seventh or major seventh. If you want to catch up quickly on this idea, then give Building Additions (and Suspensions) a read.

Now let’s look one more time at our C minor pentatonic notes and examine how they relate to the chords they are not a part of. C, for instance, is part of the C chord (it’s the root), the Am chord (it’s the third) and the F chord (it’s the fifth). It’s not a part of the G chord. In relation to the G chord, C is the eleventh. More important to the soloist, playing a C while the backing personnel are playing a G chord gives the impression of turning the G chord into Gsus4. This is especially true if the backing people are playing G5 (the G power chord, if you will).

So give a listen to what I do in this MP3 example:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Here I’m using C fairly constantly, but I’m especially emphasizing it as my target over the G chord and I hang on to it when the chord then changes to C. This is known as sustaining a note. We’ve talked about this before in respect to chords (check out the article Sustained Tones: An Animated Discussion for more in regard to chords) but here we’re using single notes from the soloist to create the sustained chord. Cool, no?

You can, of course, do this with other notes from the C major pentatonic scale. Let’s look at each and see how it relates to the other chords that they are not already a part of:

• D is the ninth of C, the fourth of Am, and the sixth of F
• E is the major seventh of F and the sixth of G
• G is the seventh of Am and the ninth of F
• A is the sixth of C and the ninth of G

So now I’m going to try another solo over our progression, this time deliberately targeting notes that are not part of chords and then holding those notes out over a chord change. Maybe two…

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I don’t know about you, but to me this is beginning to sound a little more polished. It’s certainly more interesting than targeting only my “safe notes.” And, obviously, things get even more interesting should you decide to go from using the C major pentatonic scale to playing the full C major scale, which adds the F and B notes:

• F is the fourth of C, the sixth of Am, and the seventh of G
• B is the major seventh of C, the ninth of Am, and the flatted fifth (a blue note) of F. And, as you already know, it’s the third of G

Having all the notes of the C major scale at our disposal will create even more interesting target notes when playing over our chord progression. In case you’ve forgotten where the C major scale is, here’s a reminder:

And here is a brief example of using all these notes over a solo:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This final solo sounds, again to my ears, even better than the last one. There’s a lot of interesting things going on and while I am simply using a basic scale pattern, it doesn’t sound like someone just tossing out a scale and hoping it can masquerade as a solo.

One vital aspect about using sustained notes as part of your soloing technique is that it forces you to hang onto a note, to breathe, to create a phrase instead of simply plastering the allotted space with every note available. The solo becomes something that, as Wes aptly put it, “leads the listener’s ear.” There’s an art to what’s known in music theory as “voice leading,” and good guitarists are always aware of that. It’s part of what can make a solo memorable.

As always, here is a backing track so that you can practice creating your own magic:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Next time out, we get back in step with modes, looking on various ways to spot clues in chord progressions that will help you determine which scale might work best as a choice for soloing.

Also, we’ll get to see firsthand the trap that we’ve led ourselves into by our very practicing of scales. Interested?

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8
• Practice With Purpose – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 9

Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Getting these two thoughts into your head is essential if you want to be able to solo over any song. If the point hasn’t been driven home yet then, again hopefully, this latest installment will help you drive the point home.

On the surface, this should seem easy enough. We’re going to use a simple progression of two chords and figure out what will be the best way to solo over it. I should rephrase that, as not all of us are ever going to agree as to what is the “best way” to solo. How about we say instead that we’re going to look at various options, each valid in their own way? Ready?

Okay, our chord progression will be in four-four timing and will consist of one measure (four beats) of Dm and then one measure of G. That’s G major. If you’d like to hear it, skip down to the last MP3 file of this lesson. Be sure to right click it and save it to your computer so that you can play along with it later.

Again, it sounds pretty simple, right? But before we jump right in, let’s take a moment or two and think about what we’re going to do in terms of soloing.

First, we might want to think about what key this progression is in. D minor certainly seems like a good bet as things seems to focus around that D minor chord. But if we look carefully, we should see a flaw in that logic. Have you found it?

Maybe it would be good to back up a step and look at the chords themselves. Dm is made up of the notes D, F and A, while G is made from the notes G, B and D. We should all be agreed on that, right? Let’s take a look at all the notes:

D F G A B

Given this much information, we could just construct a scale from these notes. Because it has five notes, it’s certainly a pentatonic scale, but it doesn’t match any of the two pentatonic scales that we already know. The major pentatonic is the root, second, third, fifth and sixth. So if D is our root, the D major pentatonic is D, E, F#, A and B. The minor pentatonic is made up of the root, minor third, fourth, fifth and flat seventh, and if we again use D as our root, that would mean the D minor pentatonic is D, F, G, A and Bb. Neither of these is a match for what’s going on here.

As much as I hate to say it, this is where even the slightest bit of knowledge of music theory might be a big help. You would know, for instance, that the notes taken from our two chords would have to come from the key of C. Why? The first tip off is that there are no flats or sharps. You might argue that there could be a C# or an Eb, but I would point out to you that both the F and B are natural. The key of C has no flats or sharps. When we move to the key of G, which has one sharp, that sharp is F#. It has to be. There is no key signature that has only a C#. If we go in the other direction, the key that only has one flat is F and that note is Bb.

Another argument I might use is that the key of C is the only key where we’d be able to construct both the Dm and G chords out of the major scale, as you may have read in The Power of Three or in other theory articles we have here at Guitar Noise.

It’s situations like this where we have to make a great leap forward in our thinking. We have to learn that, sometimes, there is a difference between a key or key signature and a tonal center. People often use these two concepts interchangeably, but there will be occasions where you need to separate the two ideas.

So even though we have a progression where the two chords are taken from the key of C, the tonal center we are shooting for is D minor. What does this mean to us? Well, as mentioned earlier, we could create a new pentatonic scale, just for this occasion. Seems like a lot of time and effort though, especially since we’ve already learned our pentatonic scales so well.

How about this? Let’s try using the A minor pentatonic scale, since Am is the relative minor of the key of C. The notes of this scale, which are A, C, D, E and G, will certainly fit the bill because they are all in the key of C. I’m going to do a short solo using the “Root Six” position of the A minor pentatonic:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

How about trying the D minor pentatonic scale, which I’ll write out for you as well in “Root Six” position:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

That certainly sounds a little more like it. But I can’t help thinking that I still might have a better option.

And I do – the C major scale. It has all the notes of both chords of the progression, especially the B note (noticeably absent in both our previous pentatonic scales), which totally makes that G major chord sing out.

The trick, if you want to think of it, is that while we are using the C major scale, we’re actually going to target notes in both these chords, the Dm and G. If it helps (and it certainly helps many people), don’t think of this as the C major scale, but rather as the D Dorian scale. I’ve taken the liberty of writing this out as such:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Now, folks will endlessly argue about whether or not this scale is the C Major or the D Dorian, and you’re certainly welcome to add your two cents. For right now, though, I just want you to take the time to experiment with all three, to compare and contrast sounds, to listen to what aspects of each you like. Or don’t like.

In order to help you do so, here is an “extended” version of our chord progression, just for you to play over:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

One thing you should definitely take away from this lesson, though, is the idea that you can fall back on the Dorian mode whenever you run into this particular type of chord progression, going from a minor root (or tonal center) to the major fourth. Sure, you can certainly fall back on the tried and true minor pentatonic, but your ears may appreciate you adding the extra two notes you get from taking the full scale. Your audience might, too

While you’ve gotten quite a bit of information this time out, I also want to leave you thinking about this puzzle over what to call our last scale. You might want to take a moment or two and read up on modes here at Guitar Noise. The article A La Modal might be a good place to start.

And next time out, we’ll pick right up with this question, because I think that I may have an answer that will work for many of you. Also, we’ll get to see firsthand the trap that we’ve led ourselves into by our very practicing of scales. Interested?

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8
• Practice With Purpose – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 9

Targeting a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Not surprisingly, if for no other reason than folks like to argue about almost anything, there are often disagreements over what notes, exactly, are used in the blues scale. Even music scholars don’t always see eye to eye on this topic. In their book, Music in Theory and Practice, Volume 1, authors Benward and Saker define the blues scale as the nine-note combination of the major scale and minor pentatonic that we examined in Example 3 of our last lesson, Combining the Major Scale with the Minor Pentatonic. Slightly confusing, no?

Here, we’re going to address what most musicians acknowledge as the “blues scale.” This is as good a place as any to mention that there is no such thing as a “major blues scale” or a “minor blues scale.” Just as we know there is no “major chromatic scale” or “minor whole note scale.” Like other scales, the blues scale follows a specific pattern and, also as with all other scales, we define that pattern in terms of the major scale. We’ll get to that definition in just a minute.

First, though, let’s take a moment and re-read what we know about blue notes, courtesy of Wikipedia:

In jazz and blues, a blue note (also “worried” note) is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers and genres.

As we noted in The Major and The Minor, the third lesson in this series, the Wikipedia definition goes on to add a very important sentence: “The blue notes are usually said to be flattened third, flattened fifth and flattened seventh scale degrees.”

We already know a scale where we’ve made use of two of these three blue notes, and that’s the minor pentatonic. In case you’ve forgotten, here it is in the key of C:

You undoubtedly remember our discussion of how guitarists love to use the minor pentatonic scale over standard blues progressions in major keys because it contains a healthy dose of blue notes for each chord change. Looking at the notes used in our example of the C minor pentatonic scale:

C Eb F G Bb

We can see we have two blue notes of the C major scale, those being Eb (flatted third) and Bb (flatted seventh).

But while Meatloaf may sing, “two out of three ain’t bad,” we can take a moment and add the third blue note, the flatted fifth, to the minor pentatonic with relative ease. You can see in the following example that it doesn’t even involve a change of fingering:

Really nothing to it, is there? This example is how most musicians will define the blues scale. In other words, think of it as:

Root flat 3rd 4th flat 5th 5th flat 7th

Or, in perhaps easier terms, it’s the minor pentatonic with the flat 5th added to it. The real question, though, is “how does it sound when used over a typical twelve bar blues progression?” Well, I’m glad you asked:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As in our other lessons, I’m deliberately overplaying, not to mention I’m going out of my way to play a lot of the Gb notes in the C Blues scale in order to let you hear the particular flavor of this scale. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, as the saying goes, but it certainly allows you to add some interesting touches.

Just as in our past lessons in this series, it’s a good idea to just sit and play around with this scale, not only to get it into your fingers, but also to get it into your ears and your head. And, also just as in our past lessons, here’s an “extended version” of our blues in C chord progression for you to work with!

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Because this last MP3 is about three minutes long, a good idea would be to try to cycle through the various scales you know – the major pentatonic, the minor pentatonic, the “combination” scale from our last lesson and now this blues scale. Listen to the notes each scale gives you, what type of mood (if any) a particular scale puts you in. The more music that’s in your head, the more color you can bring to your fingers.

Next time out we’re going to leave the blues for a bit, but not the minor pentatonic scale. And we’ll also be taking (yet) another look at the major scale and what a useful thing it is! In the meantime, and as always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8
• Practice With Purpose – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 9

Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Hello all,

None of you remember me, surely, but I remember this board. I used to post here regularly about 4 years ago. I was about 14 then, although I don’t remember my old posting name.

I am writing this because I am now 18 and currently pursuing a degree in classical guitar and music composition at a major U.S. conservatory, and recognize that this would not have been possible without the contributions from many different people who helped me along the way. Family, friends, teachers, and… this forum.

This site contained the only guitar instructional material outside of a private lesson that I ever thought was helpful. Also, the people on the forums were very nice to me and also very encouraging. You have all had a role in my development as a player, and I therefore wish to thank every one of you for your help and guidance.

Although guitar will always be a big part of my life, you inspired me to make it my professional pursuit as well. Thank you and good luck!

With sincerest gratitude,

Now, Paul and I get emails, seemingly on a daily basis, thanking us for the Guitar Noise website or for a particular lesson or all the lessons in general. Not surprisingly, these emails are one of the “perks” of being a part of Guitar Noise. But this particular one, and the fact that it was addressed to the entire Guitar Noise community, got me to thinking about how people can connect to one another, especially in this day and age of almost-instant communication.

Tonight, I’m going to be playing in a show call “FODfest.” “FOD” is an acronym for “Friends of Danny.” “Danny” is Daniel Pearl the Wall Street Journal reported who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002. The show is a unique combination of concert, songwriters’ song-circle and jam session and there will probably be somewhere between twenty to twenty-five musicians participating. This evening’s performance will be the first of seventeen that will be happening all over the country. If you’d like to see the FODFest 2008 schedule, look right here.

I never met Daniel Pearl. My connection to FODFest is through Todd Mack, who played in a band with Danny while they were both living in Atlanta. Danny had moved to the area from Berkshire County in Massachusetts, where both Todd and I now live. While here, Danny worked at two of the local papers and also played music with many folks. He was a classically trained violinist who also played fiddle-style and mandolin and other instruments as well. I’m constantly meeting people who had either played with or heard Danny perform.

I met Todd back when I was writing The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Bass Guitar, back in the winter of 2005-2006. It was at his Off The Beat-N-Track Studio that I recorded the audio CD that goes along with the book. We hit it off and occasionally played and performed together. In October of 2006, Todd invited me to the second FODfest, which was held at the studio. And I’ve been honored to have been asked back twice now.

Even though I never met Danny, I get to witness firsthand every day how his belief that music can bring people together and help them work through whatever differences they might have. The Guitar Noise website is certainly proof of his philosophy. We have people from over a hundred-and-sixty countries who visit here and help each other learn how to play guitar, to make music in their lives and to share their music with the world. Make no mistake, no community is perfect and trouble-free. How could one be? But, despite our disagreements, most of us are willing to communicate, to listen and to learn.

Seasoned musicians from all genres and all walks of life will tell you that listening is probably one of the most important skills a player can have, if not the most important skill.  Way too often, people communicate by saying something and then waiting for a pause in which they can again say something (usually a variation on the same thing said the first time). In true dialogue, it’s listening that provides the growth and momentum to a conversation. You hear what the other person says and then work with that. Even if you don’t agree with what the other person says, you can begin to understand why the other person thinks and feels the way he or she does. But if all one is interested in is one’s own side of the coin, then conversation is stilted and boring. No one learns anything and no one grows.

The parallels between conversation and music, particularly group performance, are markedly vivid. A group of relatively average players can sound stellar as a group if they learn to give each other space, to tailor the arrangements to the strengths of the individual members and be in constant communication with each other while playing. Conversely, a group of gifted individual players can sound downright chaotic if no one of the group is paying attention to anyone but his own playing. Playing in a group where everyone is one the same page and constantly communicating with one another will always transport the individual members to a higher plateau.

As I’m getting ready to get onstage tonight and play backup for two dozen musicians I’ve never met before, to play dobro or ukulele on songs that I’ve never heard before (and which the writers themselves may not be able to tell me the key it’s in!), I can’t help thinking that Daniel Pearl would find this show to be exciting and fun. As Todd says in his recent Guitar Noise Interview, it’s all about connecting with people and connecting people with one another through music. That’s what Danny was all about.

And I’d also like to think that, in their own individual way, this is pretty much the philosophy of every member of the Guitar Noise Community. Music, in its purest form, transcends individuals. The last thing I want to hear after playing any show, or simply playing with friends, is “you were great.” I want to hear “That was great” or “We were great!”  

I can’t help thinking, as I’m writing this, of a going away party we held for one of my friends in Chicago, very shortly before I moved from there myself. It was a backyard barbecue and there were all sorts of musicians there – the typical number of guitarists, a teenager on violin who’d never played in a group like this before, a percussion guy who primarily played washboard, an accordian player who also played in a Neil Diamond tribute trio (accordian, bassoon and some other outrageous instrument I can’t recall), and any number of singers and percussion makers.

We had a blast, playing songs we knew, playing songs we’d never tried before, getting to know one another and sharing music with each other, the other party guests and the neighbors. But the best part, to me anyway, was at the very end when we were winding down and cleaning up and the young man with the violin proclaimed for all the world to hear: “I’ve never had so much fun before in my life!”

I’d like to think Danny would have been proud.

Peace

“FOD” for Thought was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Sometimes, though, this “guitar-centric” outlook can have less than humorous effects, particularly when it comes to rhythm. People are constantly asking “What’s the strumming pattern of such-and-such a song?” “How do I figure it out?” Maybe because we as a people are being more and more visual, to the point where reading is often eschewed in favor for video or other images, but guitarists nowadays think of rhythm in terms of “up” and “down,” the motions of strumming, instead of thinking of rhythm in much simpler terms – numbers and counting.

In this lesson, the first of several on this topic, we will go over the very basics of strumming and how it applies to notes and rhythm. This lessons ties in almost exactly with two others here at Guitar Noise, so you might want to go over Keeping Time and Strumming for Beginners. Everything that we cover in this lesson is already in these two articles, basically I’m just adding sound files and trying to make sure we start on the same page.

Next time out, we will see that if we can read notation, even only the rhythmic aspect of notation, we will never again have to “wonder what the pattern is.” Simply being able to read how the music is broken up into beats and patterns within the beats, we’ll always be able to come up with a pattern that works. Quite often it will even be the same pattern that’s being played on the recording. Not that doing so should ever be your first concern!

Beyond that, we’ll try to use what we’ve learned in the first two lessons and apply it ear training. That may seem like a stretch to you at this point, but I can guarantee you something – if you are willing to count out loud, there is no rhythm, no strumming pattern that you won’t be able to suss out, pardon the pun, given a little time.

There’s something about counting out loud people don’t seem to like. We teach a lot of music lessons here at my home, both guitar and piano. And we do our best to encourage students to count out loud when they’re having problems with rhythm. You’d think we were asking them to eat slugs or something. Yet as soon as they start counting out loud, their rhythm problems with a tricky passage almost invariably straighten themselves out.

Children hate counting out loud because they think they’re old enough to not have to do that. Adults hate counting out loud for the very same reason. No one wants to look like he or she is a beginner. But what they don’t see (and hear) are professional musicians who, when faced with a tricky rhythm passage, doing exactly that – counting it out loud in order to make certain the timing is understood and played correctly.

If you listened to the first Guitar Noise Podcast on strumming (and if you missed it, or any of the other Guitar Noise Podcasts, which are all about various aspects of strumming, by the way), you can find it on the Guitar Noise Blog, you might have heard me talking about sock puppets. No lie. If you know what sock puppets are, you know that they have a limited vocabulary. They can either nod their heads “yes” or shake them to say “no.” When we’re strumming a guitar, it’s the “sock puppet saying no” motion that gives us smooth and steady strumming.

More important than that, this strumming motion also gives guitar players a built-in metronome. It’s as if you have a string attached between your strumming hand and your foot, provided you’re tapping your foot along with the music (something you should definitely get into the habit of doing). Your toe goes down on the downstroke and up on the upstroke.

Strumming will, of course, get more complicated than this eventually, but for now, you’ll be surprised at how counting, along with the sock puppet / constant motion approach will make strumming easier. Let’s start out very simply and strum four quarter notes (one beat each). Since the vast majority of songs most of you will play are going to be in 4/4 time, it seems like a good place to start:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Now, you can pick any chord you’d like for this exercise. I choose G simply because I play it a lot and it’s a chord I often default to when I’m just goofing around on the guitar.

This is strumming straight quarter notes, and since you’ve read any one of our many fine articles on rhythmic notation, you know that they are one beat each. Hence, we’ve four of them per measure.

Even though we’re strumming down on each chord, we’re also strumming up. You’re just not hitting the strings when you strum up. But you still to go through the “up” motion of skipping upstrokes, otherwise you’d never get the second downstroke, right? Skipping strings on the upstroke comes fairly naturally, even though we never think about it.

If we were to hit the strings on both the up and down, we’d be playing eighth notes, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

And let’s take a quick note here to mention that when you strum up, don’t hit all the strings. Just catching two or three of the high strings is fine. Again, you might want to refer to our first Guitar Noise Podcast for more on this.

Coming back (and again pardon the pun) to matters at hand, you should note that what I mentioned earlier about using your strumming motion as a steady metronome works. You’re going “down” on the beat while coming “up” on the off-beat, or the half-beat if you will.

The point of these two exercises is to show you that (a) all rhythms pretty much are a matter of keeping time with your “sock puppet” and (b) you are probably already comfortable with skipping the “ups” of the “down and up” of any beat. Once you understand that all beats are already a matter of breaking them into an “up and down” motion and once you discover that all strumming patterns are a matter of skipping the occasional up or down, you’re good to go. Strumming is really that simple!

But it is a matter of getting into the feel of the beat but not letting yourself get so carried away that you forget your sock puppet, which should be set on automatic pilot according to the tempo of the song.

To prove this point, let’s take a look at Exercises 8 and 9, from Tom’ Keeping Time, conveniently re-written in notation and tablature. I’ll keep the count:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You should be discovering that, with a little concentrated effort, these patterns are not all that difficult to play. Occasionally skipping an “up” is usually pretty easy for most beginners. But skipping downstrokes, ah, that’s another kettle of fish.

Let’s tackle this technique by prepping ourselves with the following pattern:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This is just another pattern where we’re hitting each beat with a “down” and occasionally missing an “up.” Take a little time to get it into your system. When you feel ready, we’re going to skip the “down” on the third beat. Set? Here we go:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

What usually happens here is that, for whatever reason, people freak out and forget to keep their “sock puppet” constantly moving. We have to go through the up motion of skipping upstrokes, as mentioned earlier, but many people don’t make a down motion when they are skipping the downstroke. If you get in the habit of having your sock puppet being in perpetual motion, you will never fall off the beat. Guaranteed.

This last example, by the way, is the same as “Exercise 18 in Tom’s article. You’ll also find it used in many of our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons, such as Nowhere Man and it gets more than a workout in many of the Guitar Noise Podcasts. Pretty handy little rhythm!

You task for next time is to try out some of the many rhythms in Tom’s article, as well as the Guitar Noise Podcasts. If you can get a handle on this “skipping the downstroke” technique, you are almost there in terms of handling the complex rhythms we’ll be starting in on next time.

As always, I hope that you’ve had fun with this, not to mention that I also hope that you’ve learned a few things.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Getting Past “Up and Down” – Part 1: “Sock Puppets” was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

In jazz and blues, a blue note (also “worried” note) is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers and genres.

Sort of continuing where we left off, I’d like to introduce you to the idea of combining scales. But before we move on, let’s take a brief step sideways to think a moment about what makes music interesting. At its heart, music is a constant shift between disharmony and harmony, what’s generally referred to in terms of “tension and resolution.” Good melodies, for example, don’t simply use notes taken from the chords of the chord progression of a song. It’s the interplay of the melodic notes against the chord progression that creates this give-and-take of tension and resolution.

Solos do this as well. Otherwise all soloing would be nothing but chord arpeggios. And we would be reading a lesson on “Turning Arpeggios into Solos” and not “Turning Scales into Solos!”

We got a front row seat for this in our last lesson when used the minor pentatonic scale to solo over the major chords of a typical twelve bar blues progression. Since we specifically used the C minor pentatonic scale (C, Eb, F, G and Bb) to solo over a progression with the chords C, F and G, we had blue notes of the C major scale – Eb (flatted third) and Bb (flatted seventh) – as well as a blue note of F scale (Eb being the flatted seventh) and two blue notes of G (Bb, which is the flatted third and F, which is the flatted seventh). Each chord of our blues progression was constantly being played against a number of blue notes that would then resolve into a note of the major chord.

But as interesting as each of these pentatonic scales is by itself, combining them gives you a much deeper palette of colors to work with.

Let’s take another look at the actual notes of the C major pentatonic scale:

C D E G A

And now let’s run through the notes of the C minor pentatonic scale:

C Eb F G Bb

This certainly gives us a lot more options. The playing off of the minor third against the major third (the Eb and E in the key of C) is something that you hear quite often in blues riffs.

Some folks like to go a step further, combining the entire major scale with the minor pentatonic. Doing so adds the major seven, which is the major third of the V chord (the B note of the G chord in our key of C) of our blues progression. Although this may seem like a lot of notes for a scale, it certainly adds a lot to our soloing options.

First, let’s take a look at the notes we’re talking about, still using the key of C major as our example:

C D Eb E F G A Bb B C

Now, let’s see where these would fall if we were using a Root Six based C major scale (plus the two blue notes Eb and Bb). First, we’ll look at the two octave C major scale itself:

So far, so good! Now, let’s add the blue notes taken from our C minor pentatonic scale. Since I’m planning on doing most of my soloing today on the high strings, we’ll add these blue notes only to the second octave:

Finally, let’s extend this scale up to the thirteen fret, which will give us a little more room to play with:

You should know the drill from here. Work through this “combined scale,” using both these last two examples, but focus on Example 3 most of all. This may seem hard to some of you as you’re used to scale patterns and now you’re likely to find yourself thinking in terms of the actual notes themselves. But that’s part of where we’re trying to go, so hang in there!

Then take a listen to the sort of thing you can do:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Yes, I’m still overplaying! But the interweaving of the major scale with the two notes taken from the minor pentatonic certainly does give this a lot of interesting things to say, doesn’t it? Playing both the Eb and E off of the C chord creates tension and release in the same phrase. It’s no wonder this sort of sound is used in so many blues solos.

Okay, your turn! Here’s an “extended version” of our blues in C chord progression for you to work with:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Remember that the whole purpose of this particular series of lessons is to demonstrate that even though we could use a single scale to base a solo on, there are all sorts of other possibilities. Up until this point we’ve examined only the major scale and the pentatonic, the latter in both major and minor forms. Now we’ve opened up a lot more potential by combining two scales.

Next time out, we’ll take a look at the “blues scale,” right after we get done arguing about what, exactly, the “blues scale” is!

And, as always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8
• Practice With Purpose – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 9

Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

To recap briefly, Choosing Colors, our first lesson in this series, introduced (or re-introduced) us to the Major scale and the Major Pentatonic Scale, which are the two important scales that most guitarists fall back on for soloing. In the sound files accompanying that lesson, we listened to the differences in the two scales when used for soloing over the same chord progression.

The second lesson, One Note at a Time, hopefully demonstrated that as you are learning your scales, you shouldn’t feel the need to cram every single note you’re learning into a solo. Phrasing, which we’ll be getting into big time a few lessons down the road, is more important than speed. That’s not to knock speed. People often mistakenly put speed into the same category as “unemotional” and nothing could be further from the truth. It’s phrasing that makes a solo sound like a solo and not like someone simply practicing his or her scales. And the speed you’re playing at doesn’t enter into it at all.

Well, that’s not totally true, and we’ll also be looking at that aspect of things three lessons from now.

Meanwhile, on with today’s work:

A lot of what we’ll cover today, in terms of the theory at least, we’ve gone over before. The Guitar Column, Scaling the Heights, contains much of the raw information that we’ll be examining, so you might want to take a moment or two and read (hopefully “re-read”) that particular lesson.

It might also be good to have a gentle reminder of what got this whole series of articles going in the first place! As with many lessons at Guitar Noise, an email is usually a good place to start:

Hi David,

I’ve read a few of your articles about constructing solos, and I appreciate the advice (thanks!). I would rate myself as an intermediate guitarist and am trying to branch out into building better solo skills. I have a fair grasp of scales and some modes of play. But I have a few questions on building solos:

It seems matching scales to a key doesn’t always work! For example, I’ve found simply using a G Major Pentatonic scale over a G-Major song doesn’t always sound right. Why doesn’t that always work? What would you say to help me build a better solo pattern?

Let’s examine the example cited:

…using a G Major Pentatonic scale over a G-Major song doesn’t always sound right…

While this statement raises many questions, I’d like to focus our attention on two: First, what do we mean when we talk about a “G-Major song?” and secondly, what do we mean when we say “doesn’t always sound right?”

Knowing a song is in the key of G Major should mean a few things to you. If you’ve read the Guitar Column Five To One, you are thinking that the G major chord is what gives the song is sense of tonality, of “home,” if you will. And, if you’ve read our other theory columns, you might also be thinking that there are certain chords that you are going to run into in the key of G major. The “I,” “IV” and “V” chords, for instance, are G, C and D (all major chords). The “ii,” “iii” and “vi” chords are Am, Bm and Em. These six chords are considered diatonic, which may sound like my beverage of choice, but really means that all the notes of these chords are taken from notes of the major scale in question. In this case, that means the G major scale. If you want to see how to come up with this yourself, take a look at the end of the section titled “Stackables” in the Guitar Column The Power of Three.

Chances are very likely that if you’re playing a song in the key of G, you’re going to run into the G, C and D chords more than anything else. For that matter, in whatever key you may find yourself playing, the “I,” “IV” and “V” chords usually are the ones you’ll find yourself playing most.

So, for the sake of keeping things simple (not to mention maintaining a balance with our past two lessons), let’s switch off to the key of C again. The “I,” “IV” and “V” chords in the key of C are C, F and G. We saw this in our previous lessons as we used the classic “I – vi – IV – V” chord progression (that being C to Am to F to G in the key of C) as an example to solo over. In the first lesson, you’ll remember we used both the C major and the C major pentatonic as our soloing scales, while in the second lesson we stuck strictly with the C major pentatonic. Things didn’t sound too bad, although I’m still getting emails from readers as to which scale they thing sounded better. Some liked the full major scale and some liked the pentatonic.

To me, these emails are fun because they aren’t really about which scale sounds better. They are about the readers and the music that sounds good to their individual pair of ears. Are you ready to try out another sound test and learn some more?

This time out, we’ll take a simpler chord progression, one using just the three primary chords of the C major scale – C, F and G. But in this lesson, we’re going to give the chord progression a bit of a blues feel, using a typical blues shuffle type pattern and a standard “Twelve Bar Blues” format. In case you’re not up to speed with knowing what Twelve Bar Blues is all about, not to worry! Just mosey on over to the Easy Songs for Beginners’ page and take a look at the lesson on Before You Accuse Me and then come right back.

Alright, then! In the key of C, the standard twelve bar blues progression would go like this:

Now, we could have all sorts of things go on in the last measure (also called the “turnaround”), but again, for the sake of simplicity, I’m just going to flip to G in order to get back to the initial C in the first measure.

For our first two sound file examples, I’m going to play this twelve bar blues progression a total of three times, the third time ending on C in measure twelve instead of G in order to give us a sense of finality. In the final MP3 sound file, I’ll play the progression a total of six times.

Let’s start by trying out the C major pentatonic scale as our soloing tool. In the first MP3 sound file, I’ll use the C major pentatonic in “Root 6″ position and stay within the pattern we’ve learned. And if you’ve forgotten the C major pentatonic scale pattern, here it is in music notation and tablature:

Take a few moments and get yourself warmed up by running through the scale a few times. Then, when you’re ready, play along with the final MP3 file (be sure to download it to your computer so you can play it whenever you’d like) and see what you think. Or listen to my take on it (and remember I’m only going through the progression three times here):

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As in our previous lessons, I feel a need to point out that I’m still overplaying! At this stage, I’m more concerned about hearing the notes and getting a feel for how this scale sounds as a soloing stage for this progression. What do you think? Do you like it? Or do you find it a little, lacking maybe?

Technically, there’s nothing wrong with what we did, so it should sound fine. But, for some of you anyway, you may find it a little lackluster. Perhaps the reason isn’t found in the chord progression or the key of the song, but rather in the style of the song itself? Okay, try to hang onto that thought while we do a lot of hopping around to gather information!

One of the major proponents of playing the blues is the use of what we call “blue notes.” Let’s borrow a definition from Wikipedia here:

In jazz and blues, a blue note (also “worried” note) is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers and genres.

The Wikipedia definition goes on to say “The blue notes are usually said to be flattened third, flattened fifth and flattened seventh scale degrees.” This is another piece of information to set aside for the moment. When playing the blues, it’s the juxtaposition of the blue notes (flattened notes of the major scale) with the major chords that produces the “expressiveness” of the genre. And if the scale that we’re using to solo with contains only diatonic notes, notes found only in the major scale of the key then we’ve got no blue notes to work with. What’s a soloist to do?

The easiest (and most obvious) answer is to use another scale. And here’s where a surprising little bit of music theory magic comes into play. Going back to our Scaling the Heights lesson, we know that every major scale, even the pentatonic one, has a relative minor scale that uses the same notes. The playing pattern is actually the same; it’s just that the notes are different. Here is a generic diagram for the major pentatonic scale, using numbers of the scale degrees instead of notes:

If you compare this to our C major pentatonic example we used earlier, you’ll see it all makes sense. “R” is the “Root” note, C. “2″ is D (the second note of the D major scale). “3″ is E, “5″ is G and “6″ is A (again, E, G and A being the third, fifth and sixth notes of the C major scale, respectively.

Now look at the same pattern, this time using the numbered scale degrees of the minor pentatonic:

If we remember that the notes of the C major scale are C, D, E, F, G, A and B, then we know that the notes of the C minor pentatonic scale are C (“R” or “Root”), Eb (flatted third or “b3″ in the diagram), F (the fourth note or “4″), G ( the fifth note or “5″) and Bb (the flatted seventh or “b7″).

Translating that information to notation and tablature, we now have the C minor pentatonic scale in Root Six form:

So, again take a few moments and get yourself warmed up by running through the scale a few times. It’s simply the same pattern but in a different place on the fretboard of your guitar. That’s not too hard to take, is it?  Again, you can go right to the final MP3 (which is on your computer, right?) or listen to me giving it a run through here:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Now, how does this sound? Some of you may find it a lot more interesting and perhaps more “appropriate” to the music. In other words, it may sound “righter” than using the major pentatonic.

Why is that? Take another look at the actual notes of the C minor pentatonic scale:

C        Eb        F        G        Bb

Now think of the chords involved in our progression. C major is made up of C, E and G. In the C minor pentatonic scale, we have two blue notes of the C major scale – Eb (flatted third) and Bb (flatted seventh). Using these blue notes against the straight major chord sets up the “expressiveness,” or “blues-ness” if you will, that defines the feeling of blues in our ears. The Eb is also a blue note of F (the flatted seventh), while the Bb and F are both blue notes of G (flatted third and flatted seventh), so each chord in the progression is served a dollop of blue notes just by using this one scale.

In other words, if you have a song in a major key but it’s a blues-styled song (or you want to make it sound like a blues song), then you want to use the minor pentatonic scale of the major key in question to achieve that effect! Are you playing blues in A major? Try the A minor pentatonic scale.

Before I forget, here’s an “extended version” of our blues in C chord progression for you to work with!

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Regardless of which scale you think sounds better, the main lesson here, as it has been with our other lessons in this series, is to listen to the differences and to develop a feel for each scale. Because you know what I’m going to say next, don’t you? There are certainly still more choices to make! Next time out we will see what happens when we can’t make a choice!

And, as always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8
• Practice With Purpose – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 9

The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

As much as I like to joke about being a “deep end” learner, the joke being that once you get out of the canvas bag filled with cement cinder blocks it’s really not all that hard to swim, and as much as I think both methods have merits, there’s a lot to be said about learning at a pace that both suits you and makes sense.

Getting a handle on soloing can be a lot like learning to swim. While there’s a lot to learn, most of us would be happy, at least for starters, to simply not sink to the bottom. This series of lessons here at Guitar Noise is being written with the hopes that we can give you some tools so that you can get started on the wonderful world of soloing.

Hopefully, you’ve already read and worked on Choosing Colors, the first lesson in this series, which introduced us (or re-introduced us) to the Major scale and the Major Pentatonic Scale -two important scales that most guitarists fall back on for soloing. We also listened to the differences in the two scales when used for soloing over the same chord progression. And it’s cool because I’ve gotten email from folks in both camps – some favoring the sound of the pentatonic and some the standard major scale. That’s what makes the world go ‘round!

In this lesson, we’re going to stick with these two scales, not to mention the very same chord progression, but narrow our focus even more. One thing that throws many beginners is the fact that there are so many notes to play! Because of the emphasis on learning scales, we tend to think we need to throw in every note that we know. And nothing could be further from the truth.

So this time out, we’re going to first work with the idea of soloing with only two notes. Sound silly? Well, it can be. But think about this – by limiting the number of notes that you’re using, you can focus on two intertwining aspects of soloing that are far more important than speed and they are rhythm and phrasing.

You may not think that lead guitarists have to concern themselves with rhythm, but you’d be dead wrong. Rhythm sets up the whole concept of phrasing and phrasing is what makes a solo sound like a solo and not someone practicing a scale.

Some guitar teachers think these concepts are so important that when they get into the concept of soloing with their students, they start them out by playing a progression and allowing the student to use only one note for soloing. The idea is to make the note count by playing it in either a variety of rhythmic patterns that fit the mood of the progression example or by letting it ring out over a number of chord changes and create all sorts of interesting tonal moods.

But we’re going to go a little easier on you and let you use two notes for starters. Which two? Well, let’s take a quick look at our chord progression again and make some choices:

Just to get the ball rolling (or maybe just to show how lazy I am), I’m going to pick the notes

C and D for us to use on our solo. Why? Well, because they are the first two notes in both the C major scale (C, D, E, F, G, A, and B) and the C Major Pentatonic Scale (C, D, E, G and A). Told you I was lazy!

Now we can pick any C and D notes anywhere on the fretboard, but I also want to work with getting comfortable up the neck a bit. So let’s use these C and D notes:

Okay, so let’s take these two notes and make up a solo by playing over our chord progression. Here’s an example I whipped up:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

If you’d like, go to the third MP3 file of this lesson and download it to your computer (or use the last MP3 file from the Choosing Colors lesson as it’s the same one!) and then give it a try.

Once again I want to point out that the object here is not to copy what I did. It’s to simply play around and for you to get a feel of what we’re trying to do here. Your sense of rhythm and phrasing is unique and you will undoubtedly come up with something far different than I did. Good!

Also, don’t be afraid of trying two different notes than the ones I chose. Changing even just one note will bring a whole new texture to the exercise, not to mention open up a host of other possibilities in terms of what you can play.

I also want to point out that I’m actually overplaying! Seriously. Just as in our last lesson, I simply want to try to give you a lot of ideas in a short period of time. You should, right now, experiment like crazy. Try to use these two notes as sparingly as possible. Try to use them as many times as you can. Make mental notes (or even write them down!) about what works and what doesn’t.

Most important of all, go out of your way to use different durations of notes – from whole notes to half notes to quarter notes to eighth and sixteenth notes – as well as making use of different durations of rests. Nothing sounds more like scales than playing every note at the same pace. Think of the very word “phrasing” and how it relates to speech. Some words or syllables are drawn out while others are clipped. You can convey a lot of emotion in how you play a single note.

Believe it or not, besides getting comfortable with the concepts of rhythm and phrasing, you are also developing your ears. You are hearing how different phrases sound and how they sound in relationship to the chord progression you’re playing. And, just as important, you are getting practice in expressing yourself. Put your emotion into the notes, even if there are only two of them, and you’ll sound like you have something to say.

After you’ve gone a couple of rounds with two notes (and remember to experiment with different combinations of notes), then try three or four. In our next example, I’m using four: C, D, E and G, in the following location on the fingerboard:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, you don’t have to worry about being fancy. The point is to hear what you can do and with how little one can make a solo that sounds like a solo. Don’t have to worry about using tons of notes at blinding speed, worry instead about making every note count.

Here, once again, is an “extended version” of our chord progression:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Download this MP3 file to your computer and use it as a backing track while you play around. Start out with just two notes for the first few passes of the progression. Then add on a third, or a third and a fourth. Again, don’t feel you have to stick with my suggestions. Just pick notes from the C major scale and go to it! But don’t use more than four different notes for now, though!

Finally, you should also take the time to try out your notes at different points along the fingerboard. Stay in position for each set of four notes so that you develop a good sense of where those notes are in relationship to each other at the same area of the fretboard.

Okay, that should keep you more than occupied for this segment of this series of lessons on soloing. Best of luck with it and I look forward to hearing how you’re progressing.

And, as always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8
• Practice With Purpose – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 9

One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Hi David,

I’ve read a few of your articles about constructing solos, and I appreciate the advice (thanks!). I would rate myself as an intermediate guitarist and am trying to branch out into building better solo skills. I have a fair grasp of scales and some modes of play. But I have a few questions on building solos:

It seems matching scales to a key doesn’t always work! For example, I’ve found simply using a G Major Pentatonic scale over a G-Major song doesn’t always sound right. Why doesn’t that always work? What would you say to help me build a better solo pattern?

Thanks for the advice,

As I worked on responding to this email, it seemed to make more and more sense to answer it in the way I do in private lessons, which is through listening and participation. And that idea turned into an article, an incredibly dense and cumbersome article by the way, which then turned into this, the first of a series of shorter lessons that will (hopefully) walk everyone through the steps of moving from knowing one’s scales to applying that knowledge to playing solos.

This series of lessons is going to be a little different than the others here at Guitar Noise (at least the others up to this point) in that you, the reader, are going to need to do a lot of listening and also quite a bit of your own experimentation. Soloing, as with many other aspects of music, is highly personal. There’s not so much a “right” or “wrong” as there is convention. And taste and style, not to mention achieving the desired musical effect, should trump convention.

But before you take those statements as a free pass to playing whatever you want to, take a moment and think. Gaining the ability to listen and the ability to take what’s in your mind and put it out through your fingers into the guitar are going to take quite a bit of practice. The key thing is that you don’t have to start totally from scratch. The more you can tell yourself what you’re trying to achieve, the easier it tends to be to achieve it.

So we do need to be able to tell, or at least tell ourselves, something about what we hear and what we want to hear. And that’s where this lesson starts us out. We’re going to listen to the difference between two scales – the major scale and the major pentatonic scale – and to start to appreciate what each scale has to offer.

If you’ve not done so already, you may find it helpful to read an old Guitar Noise Guitar Column entitled Scaling the Heights, as a lot of the basic information we’ll be using is covered there. It also will not hurt you to know how chords are formed, so you might also want to brush up on that with a quick read of The Power of Three. All right, then?

For this lesson, we’re going to use a very basic (and very standard) chord progression, the I, vi, IV, V progression that you can hear in tons of songs (Stand By Me or Last Kiss probably being ones known to many of you). We’ll be playing this in the key of C major, so that means that the chords will be C, Am, F and G.

Since we know the key of the song (C major), many of you may already be ready to play – either using the C major scale or the C major pentatonic scale. But let’s get everyone else up to speed first. The notes of the C major scale are:

Many guitarists automatic abandon the major scale, though, for the basic reason that pentatonic scales are easier to play. In most positions, you rarely need more than a stretch of three frets to play them. And the patterns of the pentatonic scale, especially the “Root 6″ pattern (where the root note is on the low E (sixth) string), are fairly easy to remember.

To make the major pentatonic scale, we take the notes at the Root (“I”), second, third, fifth and sixth positions, so the C major pentatonic scale would consist of C, D, E, G and A.

Looking through Scaling The Heights, we learn that we can play the major pentatonic in the following pattern:

Translating this pattern into notation / guitar tablature, it will look like this:

So let’s take this pattern and see what we can come up with when we play along with the chord progression of C, Am, F and G. Here’s something I did on a quick take:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Two things I want to point out – first, the object here is not to copy what I did. It’s to simply play around and to get used to the position of the scale, not to mention to get used to how the pentatonic scale sounds as a tool for soloing.

And that brings us to the second point – for the sake of this exercise, I’m not worrying about doing anything fancy. There may be a bit of a slide here and there, but no bends, no double stops, nothing remotely requiring any type of technique other than finding the notes of the scale. That’s kind of why it sounds like someone practicing a scale as opposed to a “solo.” Hopefully, not totally so! This is an issue we’ll address in a later lesson in this series.

For now, though, let’s move on to getting our ears and heads working a little more. I can’t say how true this is for all of you, but I find the sound of the C major pentatonic lead a little, shall we say, “lacking.” It’s not that it doesn’t sound okay; rather it just doesn’t seem to live up to its potential.

And when we make a closer examination of what’s going on, it’s not all that hard to see why. Let’s take a look at the notes that make up each chord of the progression, shall we?

Remembering that the C pentatonic scale consists of the notes C, D, E, G and A, we see that, when we’re playing along with the C and Am chords, every note of the chord is accounted for in the pentatonic scale. But when we play the F and G chords, we’re missing a note in each. There’s no F in the C major pentatonic scale, so when we play along with the F chord, there’s no root note (F) to nail the chord down and give it a nice foundation. And when we play the G chord, we’re missing the B note, which determines whether the G chord is major or minor. Plus, the B note is the “leading tone” of the C major scale – the note that pulls our ears to the home tonality of C.

In other words, the notes that we’ve dropped from the C major scale to make the C major pentatonic (F and B) are kind of important in this chord progression. So let’s add them back and see what happens when we try soloing in the C major scale. First off, let’s look at the pattern:

And now let’s translate that into notation and tablature:

And, after practicing the pattern a little to get it into our fingers, let’s play along with the chord progression again. Just for the sake of being dramatic, I’d tried to stress the F and B notes when I played this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, I can’t stress enough that this is a matter of personal taste. To my ears, using the entire C major scale sounds a lot more interesting. There are more opportunities to create interesting uses of dissonance (more on that in upcoming lessons!), not to mention using the B note to create chord variations – played over the C you get Cmaj7 and played over the Am you get Am(add9).

Try thinking about it this way: your solo is a painting and your scale is a pallet of colors. In this lesson, we’ve done two paintings, one using five colors (the C major pentatonic scale) and one using seven colors (the C major scale). Both certainly work, but if I were to ask you which scale is the “right” one to use, what would you say? It really depends on what you’re trying to paint.

So the first lesson we need to learn is this – it’s one thing to know our scales; it’s another matter entirely to have an awareness of what they can do. Or to know which one to pick or how to even determine how to know which one to pick. Part of this can be learned – convention dictates that some things just go together well. But part of it is also a matter of taking the time to listen and to experiment with what you know. Not to mention to continue to learn new things in order to have more with which to experiment.

So, to help you get going on this, here’s an “extended version” of our chord progression:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Download this MP3 file to your computer and use it as a backing track while you play around with both the C major and the C major pentatonic scales. Feel free to noodle aimlessly at first, but once you’re comfortable, try to listen seriously to yourself (recording yourself isn’t a bad idea!) and to how you may gravitate towards one of these two scales more than the other.

Also, take the time to get very comfortable with both of these scales! We’ll be using them as examples in the next upcoming lessons in this series, so having them in your fingers can only be a good thing! Extra credit if you know the note names in position!

And, as always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8
• Practice With Purpose – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 9

Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

As I mentioned, for this lesson we want to focus on the C and Am chords, both of which we know to be “Root 5″ chords. This means the root note for these two chords (C for C and A for Am) can be found on the fifth (A) string. Let’s use our “contrary motion” pattern from the first Travis Picking tutorial and, again just to simplify things for this lesson; we’ll concentrate on our middle four strings, totally ignoring both the high (first) and low (sixth) E strings, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a guide to the picking fingering symbols:

• “T” will be your thumb
• “i” will be your index finger.
• “m” will be your middle finger.
• “a” will be your ring finger.

You’ll also notice that I’m still counting out the example (and I’m encouraging you to do so as well), because knowing where the beat is supposed to fall is going to be very important in a minute!

Okay, take a few moments and get that into your head. Because now it’s time to get it out of your head! Seriously, one of the things I mentioned last time out was that finger picking is actually not all that hard to get into. Once your fingers have a pattern, it usually takes a small amount of time and practice for them to get so into it that you pick up speed quite easily.

This ease with which one takes to finger style is both a blessing and a bane. It’s good, obviously because we can, again with a bit of time and practice, get to the point where we can play a whole song, chord changes and all, just by using a single pattern, as we did in the first Travis tutorial with Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind.

But it’s also bad because we get so set in a pattern that we can automatically default to it without thinking. And if we want to switch to a different pattern, or even simply to learn a new picking pattern, we often have to start from scratch.

And today we do want to try a new pattern. Or rather, a variation on the “contrary motion” pattern that we’ve already learned. Instead of alternating thumb and finger throughout the measure, we want to pick with both the thumb and finger on the first beat only and then finish the measure out normally, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, you’ll hear me counting in the MP3 here. The reason is that we’ve got absolutely nothing going on in the second half of the first beat because we’ve shifted the first use of the fingers to the initial beat, when we pluck or “pinch” the strings with both thumb (picking the A string) and middle finger (playing the B string). If you’ve practiced using your thumb to keep a steady beat, counting the “one, two, three, four” of any given measure, this shouldn’t be all that big of a step for you. But before we move on, take some time and get this new pattern into your fingers.

This “pinch” pattern is used in countless songs. I often refer to it, jokingly of course, as “generic folk pattern #2.” It’s amazing how easy it is to fall into once you’ve got it down. And it’s also very important because the pinch allows you to add a melody line to your playing. Elizabeth Cotton’s classic song, Freight Train, pretty much uses this pattern throughout, and which notes you fret and subsequently pinch) on the high strings sing out the song’s melody. Perhaps we’ll make a lesson of that at some point.

But for right now, we want to concentrate on getting the pattern down to the point where we can play it and have a conversation while playing. Once we’re there, then we’ll start to do a bit of very simple ornamentation, which will lead us to the introduction of Dust in the Wind.

A brief side trip, though – I made this past point in Guitar Noise Podcast #7 (which should have gone up online by now! Check it out at the Guitar Noise Blog and it bears repeating. If you can get yourself to the point where you can play a pattern – strumming or fingerstyle or a combination of both – and hold a conversation, then you are more than ninety percent of the way there. Just as you saw with Blowin’ in the Wind, making chord changes while playing a fingerstyle song is a lot easier when you’re comfortable with the pattern (or patterns) you’re playing. It may take a little effort to coordinate both hands, but nowhere near as much effort if you decided to not learn the pattern first.

Alright then, now we want to speed things up a bit. Not really, although it’s going to seem like it when you see the music notation. Basically, we want to play two sets of our new “pinch” pattern in one single measure, which means that instead of using quarter notes and eighth notes, we’ll be playing eighth notes and sixteenth notes, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Don’t let all the sixteenth notes get to you! All we’re doing is taking the pattern that you’ve already got in your fingers and using your thumb to measure out eighth notes instead of quarter notes. That’s all. So now your thumb is playing “one and two and three and four and…” instead of just “one, two, three, four.” Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s more than that.

Now let’s spice things up a bit – first by playing a Cmaj7 chord instead of C and then trying out a Cadd9 chord. To play Cmaj7, as you know, all you have to do is finger a C chord and then remove your index finger, leaving the B string open. For Cadd9, add your pinky to the third fret of the B string, which adds a D note to the C chord. Here’s what they are like:

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Again, take each chord separately to start with and practice it until you feel you can play it without thinking. Then, when you’re ready, we’ll put the three chords together in sequence, like this:

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Now, that sound familiar, doesn’t it?

Because of all the work you’ve done up ’til this point, you should find that you’re making these chord changes smoothly and cleanly. Give yourself a pat on the back and then we’ll try the same thing with some Am based chords:

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You know the drill by now, right? Once you’re comfortable with these new chords (and you want to be sure you know their names and fingerings!), we’ve got one more task, and that’s to put them into the correct sequence for our introduction to Dust in the Wind:

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The sticky point here for many is going to be the start of the third line. Switching between the Asus2 at the end of the second line and the Cadd9 that starts the third will take a bit of practice (preferably at a relatively slow tempo!) until you get to the point where you don’t worry about it.

But hang in there! If you’ve followed any of the song lessons at Guitar Noise, you’ll know that this “pinch” method occurs quite frequently. You’ll find simpler variations on it in Bookends and Blackbird as well as more complicated uses in Julia, just to name a few. For now, though, get yourself together with this introduction and you’ll be more than halfway home when our complete lesson on Dust in the Wind gets online later this summer.

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

Add A Pinch – Basic Travis Finger Picking Tutorial – Part 2 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

And when the inevitable question, “should I use my fingers or use a pick?” comes along, again, the answer should be “yes.” Think of it this way: each new technique or idea you have when learning the guitar is like getting a new crayon. Yes, you can certainly create marvelous art with five or six crayons but, being lazy myself, I’d rather have a box of one hundred and eighty-eight crayons to choose from.

Moreover (and pardon the pun), finger style guitar is not all that hard to pick up. In fact, it’s quite easy for most people to get started. And what I’d like to do with this lesson is to get you started. We’ll also toss in an easy song to help you practice your newfound finger picking skills.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Remember that we’ve done some work on finger picking before. The Guitar Noise Easy Songs for Beginners Lesson on The House of the Rising Sun is an excellent place to start if you’ve not made any previous attempts to play finger style. Those patterns are simple arpeggios and will help you to just get used to the idea of tossing your fingers about on the guitar strings.

In this lesson, we’re going to tackle a style of finger picking called Travis picking. This is named after Merle Travis, one of country music’s enduring legends, whose guitar work gained him fame before he was twenty. Nowadays, people say “Travis picking” in much the same way we use words like “Xerox” to mean all photocopying, or “Coke” to mean all soft drinks. But the specific characteristics of Travis picking is the steady, almost metronome-like use of the thumb to play bass notes while the other fingers dance over the higher strings.

And it’s this use of the thumb that offers most beginning guitarists something besides a fancy way of playing. Travis picking is an excellent way to help one develop a steady sense of rhythm.

So let’s get started! The first thing we want to do is to get comfortable with keeping the beat with our thumb. How about we start with a simple D major chord, open position? Get your full D chord in place even though we’re only going to be playing two strings of it. Using your thumb and keeping a steady beat, pick the open D string on the first beat, the G string (with your finger on the second fret) on the second beat, the D string again on the third beat and (you guessed it!) the G string again on the fourth beat. Should sound (and look) like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

For the sake of this lesson, let’s get on the same page as far as finger labeling. And I mean the fingers of your picking hand, not the one on the neck!

“T” will be your thumb.

“i” will be your index finger.

“m” will be your middle finger.

“a” will be your ring finger.

As I mentioned in the House of the Rising Sun lesson, if I was trying to teach you correct form and function, you’d use your thumb to play notes on the three lowest strings (low E, A and D), your ring finger on the first (high E) string, your middle finger on the B string and your index finger on the G string. But, as you can see in our very first example, we’re not going to go strictly with those guidelines. The goal here is to use the thumb to keep the beat and if that means it’s playing a “forbidden string” for our lesson, so be it.

Okay, back to our thumb. See if you can work Example 1 without looking at your hands. Either hand. A good benchmark to set for yourself with almost anything on the guitar is to try to play a technique without looking at your hands. Then while singing or holding a conversation. If you can get to that point with these simple finger picking exercises in this lesson, then you’re well on your way to becoming fairly proficient at basic finger style guitar.

Once you’re good with Example 1, then it’s time to add the fingers. Let’s first try a “parallel motion” pattern, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You can see and hear how the notes played by the fingers are coming in on the off-beats, right in between the notes played by the thumb, which are on the beat. The fingers are also moving in the same direction as the thumb, namely one string closer to the floor.

The first time you try this, you want to work slowly. It also helps immensely to count out loud (as I’m doing in the MP3) in order to keep your thumb going with the correct timing. You probably won’t have to do that for long. And you’ll also be surprised that your fingers will get faster and faster before you know it.

While I’m suggesting in Example 2 that you use your middle finger for the high E (first) string and your index for the B. But you could also go the classical route and use your ring finger on the E and middle finger on the B. Or you could go the easy way and use your index finger for both strings,,,

Also, don’t be too concerned about a name for this particular pattern, or any pattern for that matter. We’re calling it “parallel motion;” some teachers call it “inside out,” some call it “Fred” (don’t ask!). Rather, think about this: One of the fascinating things about finger style guitar is how quickly most people’s fingers take to a pattern. But that’s also one of the biggest traps of finger picking. Once your fingers latch on to a pattern, it’s hard to break out of it and you can find yourself sounding a bit robotic.

So let’s change our pattern, shall we? How about reversing how we play the fingers?

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Many of you will find this “contrary motion” (or “outside in,” if you prefer) pattern a little easier. It’s used in many, many songs and, again with some practice, you should find that your hands take to it pretty well.

Again, take your time and try to get to the point where you can perform these patterns without looking at either of your hands. When you get to that point, then you’ll be able to find part of the true beauty of finger style. Listen to what happens when you simply lift your ring finger off the high E (first) string while playing either pattern:

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Pretty good for someone who’s just started finger picking, huh? This is why I’m harping on getting to the point where you don’t have to think about it. When you can trust your picking hand to do its job, then you can get fancy with the chord changes and even staying on a single chord offers more musical possibilities than you might imagine.

Alright, back to the task at hand. D, as you already know, is a “root four” chord, meaning that its root note (D) is played on the fourth string. So let’s branch out a bit and add two more chords to our finger picking. Rather, let’s add two new root positions:

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The patterns for the A chord, since A is a “root five” chord, will also work for Am and C, not to mention A7 and C7 or other variations of these chords that you know in open position. Likewise the patterns for G will serve you perfectly fine if you’re playing any other “root six” position chord, such as E or Em.

The other thing to note here is that you also have other options when it comes to which strings you decide to play. I chose these patterns for the A and G chords because I like the sound. For instance, some people might like to play the open G string as the second “thumb” string instead of the open D, as shown in the previous example. And if you play your G with the D note (third fret of the B string) covered, then you’re going to have yet another different sound.

Some people like to stick with the inner strings when playing root five chords, so on the A chord you’d be striking the open A string with the thumb, then (if using parallel motion) the G string with the index finger, then the D (thumb again) and then the B (middle finger). If you want a more ambiguous sound, eliminating the B string when playing the A chord means that you’re just playing A and E notes, which make up the A5 or A “power chord.” And you can also play a pattern for the A chord where you occasionally lift your finger off the B string (temporarily creating an Aadd9 chord), much as we did with the D chord in Example 4.

Telling you all this is not meant to overwhelm you with decisions. Rather, it’s to give you reasons to explore what you can do with even the simplest of patterns such as this. While you’re practicing these particular chords (and others we’ve mentioned), don’t be afraid to experiment and to listen to all the possibilities that you can come up with. Try to get the sounds into your head and be sure to write down all the ideas you especially like.

And because I think it’s a lot more fun to play songs than to simply practice patterns, why don’t we use this easy version of the Bob Dylan classic, Blowin’ In The Wind as a way to work on our picking and chord changing. There are who knows how many versions of this song, so don’t worry about sounding like the “definitive” one. Just have fun practicing your new Travis picking skills! (Oh, a lot of people play this in Eb for some reason. So just slip a capo on the first fret and you’ll be fine!)

Use any of the patterns you’d like for the D, G and A chords that we’ve been working on today in the appropriate places. I marked a chord for each four beats to help you out:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As you can hear in this example, you don’t really want to just hang on to the same pattern over and over. It feels a lot more organic and real when you sometimes “slip up” or change from one pattern to another. And don’t forget about using the ideas in Example 4 when sitting on the D chord for more than one measure.

I hope this brief introduction to Travis picking has been enjoyable for you. Even more important, I hope that you’ve found that finger picking isn’t truly all that hard. We’re going to do a number of articles in the near future that will build on what you’ve learned here, so if you’re enjoying working on this, please take the time to get your confidence in your picking abilities built up. It’s not all that far a step to go from this lesson to some of our Intermediate lessons, such as Scarborough Fair, Fields of Gold, or Time After Time.

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

Let Your Fingers Do the Talking – Basic Travis Finger Picking Tutorial – Part 1 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

The ability to not take words literally, as you probably (and literally) know, is vital in life. Particularly if you teach. Many’s the time a student will say, “I always do this part wrong” or “I practiced a lot this week” and you find out that “always” isn’t even close to always and that “a lot” means the better part of a half hour total.

So, with this in mind, let’s first take a look at some other vague words, such as:

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Or how about these two: strumming pattern…

You can’t imagine how many times the Guitar Noise forum gets the question, “what is the strumming pattern to (fill in the name of whatever song you’d like)?” And while it is a valuable question, it is also a misleading one.

For instance, let’s take the Bob Dylan classic, Blowin’ In The Wind. If someone asked you what “the” strumming pattern was for this song, what would you say? Even Dylan himself has played this song in so many wildly different arrangements that you’d have to think hard about what you wanted to set as “the strumming pattern.” Here’s just a brief example of what’s possible, using only the first line:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

And this isn’t taking into account the different stylistic things you could be doing, such as playing it in a punk, power chord arrangement or perhaps reggae or even a Stevie Wonder-inspired gospel rendition. (By the way, for a look at how you can create different genre-based arrangements, take a few minutes and read this old column on this very topic: Do You Genre Dance?)

For some people, defining “the” strumming pattern of a song is easy. They will cite the original recorded version of the song in question as their strumming pattern. But even this answer is not always so cut and dried.

Do me a favor and strum a chord, whatever chord you chose. Now pick a simple strumming pattern of four beats in length, perhaps something like this, using an Em chord:

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Are we good so far? Great! Now play this pattern for the length of an average song, say three-and-a-half minutes, and see if you can flawlessly stick to the pattern. Chances are likely that you can’t, that there’ll be little glitches here and there. Maybe you won’t hit all the strings on a beat somewhere or just catch one or two some place else. This is normal and it’s also good.

Quick aside – you might notice that I’m totally skipping the whole “down / up” debate that usually, pardon the pun, accompanies any talk about strumming pattern. That’s because “down” and “up” are almost always a function of specific rhythms and we’ll be looking at that very soon in an upcoming column.

But, for now, let’s get back to why it’s good to not play one specific pattern for the length of a song. If you did manage to play an entire song using one pattern, then your performance would sound incredibly wooden. Robotic might even be a better choice of words. This is why when you look at “authentic guitar recorded tablature” books, you might find passages that look like these:

By the bye, these patterns come from (1) Neil Young’s Heart of Gold, (2) Welcome To The Machine by Pink Floyd and (3) Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Hey Joe, taken from his Are You Experienced? album. When faced with transcriptions like this, you could (and an incredible number of people do) painstakingly try to hit the “correct” strings. Or you could use a little logic, coupled with a new bit of terminology to help you along.

First off, instead of looking at this as a “strumming pattern,” think of it as a “recorded performance.” This is what happened to get on the recording. Take a close look at each transcription. Heart of Gold is simply a measure of an Em7 chord (voiced as 022030) being strummed, while the second example finds David Gilmour of Pink Floyd strumming a measure (in 6 / 4 time) of Cmaj7 (voiced X32000). Jimi switches between barre chords of D (X5777X) and A (5X7655), with a slight ornamentation on the A chord when he adds the B note at the seventh fret of the high E (first) string.

My question to you would be “why get hung up on hitting specific strings when it’s obvious that they’re not concerned about it?” Remember when you tried to strum the whole chord for a length of time and found yourself sometimes not hitting all the strings you wanted to? That’s precisely what’s happening here, except for one important thing – these guitarists are simply playing chords. They each have their own style of strumming, their own little tics that make them play one string more often than others or to miss the high E string on occasion.

Most transcribers know this and usually won’t bother putting in this much detail. Instead, they’ll post a rhythmic pattern with a chord and leave you to strum the strings in whatever way you might happen to do. The Heart of Gold example would then look something like this:

In many books, you’d find this notation written without the staff, simply floating above the staff containing the melody and lyrics.

Another thing we mentioned earlier was that you didn’t want to sound robotic when playing. It’s hard not to stress this too much. Music is alive and performing music is about being alive. Small catches (or “glitches,” if you want to still want to think of them as mistakes in your patterns) are actually interesting and beneficial to your listeners. As long as you’re keeping the rhythm and have the basic handle on your pattern, few people are going to come up to you and say, “You know, in the original recording, Neil plays three strings and not just two, as you did…” And anyone who does come up to you and say that truly needs a life! Just to prove a point, here are three relatively well known bits of music. See if you can identify them, even though none are played according to the “recorded performance” patterns:

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An interesting sidebar to all this – when I was doing research while writing The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Bass Guitar, I spent a great deal of time going over both bass tutorial books as well as books of transcribed bass parts from recorded songs. A very fascinating observation was that if you looked at music older than about 1985, the bass transcriber often wrote out the entire song. In the Are You Experienced? performance of Hey Joe, for example, Noel Redding’s bass part would certainly repeat itself, but he played all sorts of little variations of the bass line, some adding little rhythm tics, others using grace notes by means of slides, hammer-ons and pull-offs in order to spice things up.

But many, many bass transcriptions of newer songs could have very easily been done via “cut and paste,” which lead me to wonder whether or not the actual recording was also done that way. In this digital age, it’s not unheard of for producers of almost all genres of music to get the segment of music they like and then digitally splice together a bass part or even a rhythm guitar part. And while we’re used to this sort of thing in some genres of music, such as the sampled sections of modern R&B, it’s also done in rock ‘n’ roll.

So when you’re listening to a specific “strumming pattern,” listen hard and see if what you’re listening to isn’t really one pattern at all, but rather a combination of many different patterns. Maybe even one that has single notes and partial chords thrown in for good measure.

One of my reasons for bringing all this up is that our upcoming song lessons are going to exploring how to go about making your playing less “pattern reliant.” One of the important development stages you will face as a guitar player is when you realize that you want to play things in your own style. To step from copying to creating.

And hopefully, this little discussion on patterns will help you to get started!

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forum page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

The Pattern Trap was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Be that as it may, let’s take a quick moment to note two things concerning our lesson: First, when I say “wrap up,” I’m lying. Not to mention making a bad, if late, joke concerning Christmas presents. It’s kind of silly to say that we ever wrap up anything in these lessons, because one of the purposes behind them is to give you ideas and tools that you can use no matter what song you’re playing. We’ll be seeing lots of walking bass lies in the future. I’m just hoping I don’t have to explain them from scratch.

Liner Notes: The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones formed in London in 1962 with singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards forming one of rock music’s most enduring songwriting partnerships.

Guitar Noise has several easy guitar lessons for classic Rolling Stones songs.

• Happy
• Play With Fire

For more check out our artist page for The Rolling Stones

The second thing is that we’ll also use this lesson to give us a bit of an introduction into the idea of cross picking. But more on that in a moment…

In terms of structure, As Tears Go By is made up of three verses, four if you count an instrumental verse between the second and third verses. Each verse contains four lines and the first two lines have the same chord progression. Have a look:

As you can see here, there’s nothing you can’t handle. So if you’d like, pick a strumming pattern and go. Here’s one that will work nicely:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This is, of course, one of countless patterns that will work for this song. I’ve chosen this particular strumming pattern in order to help us make incorporating a walking bass line a little easier. Also, being sneaky, having both the pattern and the walking bass line will make our look at cross picking a little easier as well.

I should also mention here that, while I’m fairly certain these are the right chords; I’ve heard all sorts of chord substitutions in the numerous arrangements of this song that I’ve heard over the years. Some folks use A7 instead of A. Some like the sound of Am or Am7 instead of A. And, as you’ll see towards the end of the lesson, there’s all sorts of suspended chords and fills and ornamentation you can add when you’re playing.

So let’s use this strumming pattern and chord progression as a template and get going with a walking bass line. At this point, I hope, you’ll see it as nothing more than “connecting the dots” between the root notes of the chords:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

After going through the lessons on You Are My Sunshine and Connecting the Dots, Part 3, this sort of thing will hopefully be old hat to some of you by now. The only somewhat tricky part involves using the open low E (sixth) string for the E and F# notes when you change from the D to the G chords. A lot of people find it easy to hook one’s thumb over the top of the neck to get that F#, but since you’re not playing any chord at that point, just using the index or middle finger should work fine.

If you are comfortable with what we’re doing to this point, that’s cool because that allows you to start trying some other variations. For example, you could stagger the strumming and the bass line on the section where the chords change from G to Em:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, you can use either your thumb or a finger to get the F# note in the bass. Not worrying about hitting the B note (second fret of the A string) of a “normal” G chord does have some advantages!

While this first variation may not seem like that big of a change, it makes a big difference to the listener, if for no other reason that you’ve broken up the strumming / rhythm pattern that you’ve been using for the first two and a half lines of the verse. Little subtleties such as this are how you keep from being robotic, playing the same strumming or rhythm pattern over and over and over again.

The second variation carries the “new” rhythm pattern (which, as you’ve already figured out, is the same rhythm that we used for the original strumming template.

You can likewise tinker around all throughout the song. Here are some suggestions for the very last line, where you change from D to D7:

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The first variation uses notes of the D chord (D and A, of the open D and A strings respectively, and F# at the second fret of the low E string) before going back to the open E and F# to walk back up to G. Here you might definitely find using your thumb an advantage in fretting your bass note of F#.

Things get a little more complicated with the second variation even though, to the ears at least, it’s a simple descending walking bass line. Simple to the ears, but you’ll want to take some time sussing out the fingering. Personally, I find myself using my pinky to get the C note (third fret of the A string) in the bass and then changing my whole fingering around – index finger on the B (second fret of the A string) in the bass while my middle, ring and pinky reform the D chord in the high strings. Some people like forming a “mini-barre” chord, using their index finger to cover the second fret of the high three strings and getting the D at the third fret of the B string with either the ring finger or pinky. This frees up the middle finger for the bass notes. Take you time with this variation and be prepared to do some practicing!

The third variation sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is. One starts out with the normal D chord and then adds a pinky to the third fret of the high E (first) string to get the G note (technically turning the whole thing into Dsus4), then removes it to get the second fret again and then opens up the first string entirely for the E note. While we could spend ages debating that we’ve created a Dsus2, it’s all merely ornamentation.

The second measure of this variation can all be done with pull-offs if you wish. Sounds very cool, in fact!

In and of itself, there’s enough here to mess around with without going any further. But I’d like to take one last step (or two) forward, if for no other reason than to give you more to think about. What we’re going to try to do is to pick individual strings in place of the strumming of chords. Some people call this flat picking, some call it cross picking and I’m not here to debate terminology. To me, it’s just part of playing. Let’s start with the G chord and work through the first line:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Here, regardless of the chord, we’re starting with the root note on a downstroke and then hitting the high E (first) string with an upstroke, then a downstroke on the D string and finally an upstroke on the B string. You’ll find this a lot easier using alternate picking and you may also simply find playing chords in this manner a good exercise to help you get better at alternate picking. Even if you miss the string you want, you’ll hit another note in the chord as long as you keep the chord in place with your fingers.

And frankly, no one’s going to know if you make a mistake unless you start swearing! I can’t stress enough here that this is, again, one of many patterns that you can play. And I also want you to listen to something – in the MP3, I play the first line exactly as written out and then go and then just play the rest of the verse without worrying about the pattern. To my ears, things sound a lot better when I’m not worried about it. Why? Because then I’m playing and not being a tape recorder is certainly part of it. But as I just mentioned, as long as I keep my chord shapes, there’s not going to be a bad note. Most songs don’t require you to use a single pattern throughout. Doing so, in fact, makes you sound like you’re just a looping device. More importantly, it tires you out as much as it does your listener.

As a guitarist, you’re not going to be playing in front of people and muttering under your breath “…root note, high E string, D string, B string, root note…” Trust me, you don’t want to be! Right now you merely want to be thinking “bass, high, middle, high-ish” and getting yourself comfortable with playing in this manner. Before long, you’ll be able to add in bass notes as well:

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You’ll have to forgive me for only giving you the first two lines as a start. You’re actually getting off better than my private students, who have to come back to me in a week’s time with whatever they’ve dreamed up as an accompaniment for this song. A lot of times, and this is when I know they’ve got the point, they’ll play it slightly differently in each verse and not be totally conscious of what they’re doing. You might end up with something like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Or something totally different. But that’s the whole idea.

As always, I hope that you’ve had fun with this lesson and have learned a few things about walking bass lines in the past few months. In the near future, we’ll be looking at how to combine strumming with picking and will, hopefully, be sounding a lot more like musicians and less like people who panic without patterns!

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Connecting The Dots – Part 1
• Connecting The Dots – Part 2
• Connecting The Dots – Part 3

As Tears Go By – The Rolling Stones was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise