Guitar Noise

While it’s vital to use a chord progression to help you decide on a scale, knowing the style or feel of both a song and a scale is just as important. This lesson focuses on the minor pentatonic scale and why it is used so much for blues (and other genres) in major keys.

After spending our last lesson looking at all the notes in a scale, this time we’re going to just look at a few. One of the best things you can do to get going as a soloist is to minimize the number of notes you use in a solo. Focusing on one, two, three or four notes will help you on both rhythm and phrasing, which make a solo a lot more interesting than just stringing as many notes together as fast as you can.

Putting together solos is not easy for a lot of people, and the conventional teaching (”just use your scales”) doesn’t always make sense when you’re just starting out. In this, the first of a series of articles, we take a listen to the differences in tonal color between the major scale and the major pentatonic.

Guitarists tend to be somewhat comfortable with note names in open position, but become disoriented and frustrated when they attempt to move up the neck. Dr. Morris, Coordinator of Guitar Studies at California State University presents five scale patterns, which, when combined with a basic knowledge of the Circle of Fifths, will allow you to play in any key over the entire neck of the guitar.

Here’s Graham’s take on using a mathematical approach to learning the fretboard. And while he’ll be the first to say that this is not a replacement for theory and it won’t teach you the names of notes in scales or chords, but it does offer you a way of using theory without too much thought.

Tom Serb explores three different ways that the guitarist can incorporate altered or exotic scales into his or her playing and gives us examples using both the Zangula and Rwanda scales. This article is a gift for those of you looking to expand your soloing vocabulary.

Let’s take some of the things we’ve discussed in past columns and see them put to good use. If you’d like, you can even learn how to play Lindsay Buckingham’s solo from the original recording of Landslide. But you’ve got to promise to learn something.

In this column we show you how to put together any modal scale yourself. Also, we’ll explore a few of the practical applications when it comes to modes. And if you’re not careful, you may learn two easy songs - Green Day’s Warning and that old Desmond Dekker reggae classic, The Israelites.

Did you know that every major scale is actually seven separate modal scales? In his latest lesson, Peter Simms helps you learn these scales easily.

There is no mystery in modes or theory at all. There are seven tones to the major scale hence there are seven modes to the major scale.

Here is a great introduction to the Mixolydian scale - how to find it, how to use it. It’s great for blues, rock and a host of other things and, as always, Darrin makes learning it a joy and not a chore.

This beginner’s primer explains different types of scales and unusual chord progressions. We’ll learn how they work in songs like Gimme Shelter and Hey Joe.