Author’s Note: Prior knowledge of the five Minor Pentatonic box patterns and the 7 modal shapes is helpful for understanding this lesson, but not absolutely necessary.

As a guitarist, I am primarily self-taught and didn’t have any formal music theory training in the early stages of my playing. The first scales that I learned were the five positions or box patterns of the minor pentatonic scale. I wrote the diagrams out by hand, and would play (and draw) them constantly.

When I was first exposed to the seven modes of the major scale, I did the same thing; sketched the fretboard diagrams, studied how the shapes fit together, etc. Even after I had the modal shapes memorized, I was still having a difficult time actually applying them to my lead playing. Seven shapes just seemed like too many after becoming so accustomed to the five box patterns of the pentatonic scale.

Then I came up with an idea: What if I divided the modes of the major scale up into five scale chunks, based on the five Minor Pentatonic box patterns that I was already comfortable with? This way I would only have to add a couple of new notes to each of the five pentatonic boxes! For lack of a better name, I’ve decided to call this the Pentamodal Idea.

To demonstrate, let’s work out an example for a scale which is commonly used in rock guitar lead playing – the sixth mode of the Major Scale, Aeolian mode (a.k.a. the Natural Minor scale). And let’s use the key of A Minor (the relative minor of C Major) for our examples. This means that we will have five shapes, each one starting on a note of the A Minor Pentatonic scale (A, C, E, D and G).

Here is our 1st Pentamodal shape, Aeolian Mode:

Aeolian Mode w/ A Minor Pentatonic box 1 notes circled

In this example, as well as all those that follow, the notes of the A Minor Pentatonic scale are circled. The notes not circled are the two notes of the A Natural Minor scale that are not part of the Minor Pentatonic, which are B and F.

Because there is no B in the A Minor Pentatonic Scale, we will skip over the Locrian mode, which would normally follow Aeolian, since its first note (B at the seventh fret of the low E string) does not align with our A Minor Pentatonic scale box patterns.

Skipping the Locrian brings us to Pentamodal Pattern #2, Ionian Mode:

Ionian Mode w/ A Minor Pentatonic box 2 notes circled

Note: Keep in mind that even though we may have skipped over the Locrian Mode, its notes are still available for us to use in our soloing via Patterns #1 and #2, we just aren’t thinking of it as its own individual shape or box pattern.

Continuing in order, Pattern #3 consists of the Dorian shape:

Dorian Mode w/ A Minor Pentatonic box 3 notes circled

Next is Pattern #4, which includes the Phrygian mode:

Phrygian Mode w/ A Minor Pentatonic box 4 notes circled

We will skip the mode that would normally follow Phrygian, (Lydian) because its first note, F, does not align with the Minor Pentatonic scale box pattern in our A Aeolian-based example.

This brings us to our 5th and final pattern, using the Mixolydian mode:

Mixolydian Mode w/ A Minor Pentatonic box 5 notes circled

Key Points:

1. Remember, we’re still playing all of the notes of the seven modes, we’ve just chosen to break them up into 5 box patterns – like our minor pentatonic scales.
2. The above patterns will also work for a C Ionian (Major) root, since it is the relative major of A Aeolian Mode.
3. Depending on which mode we choose to be our #1 (root) or parent scale, different modes may be skipped over. For example, if A Dorian minor was our #1 scale, we would skip Phrygian (at B, the seventh fret of the low E string) and Lydian would be our #2 shape, at the 8th fret (the C note).
4. This is a “quick-and-dirty” method for assimilating the modes into your playing. Once you become familiar with using these shapes, I highly recommend also working out and memorizing the three note-per-string patterns for the modes. Box patterns are great for breaking ideas into small, easily digestible pieces, but you don’t want to be limited by them either.

If you are not familiar with the pentatonic scale or want another angle on it, visit http://paultauterouff.com/freeguitarlesson.php to receive a free companion pentatonic lesson along with several other free bonus guitar lessons.

I hope this lesson has helped you to begin to implement modal sounds into your guitar playing – have fun!

©2010 Paul Tauterouff All Rights Reserved

About The Author: Paul Tauterouff is a professional musician/ guitar teacher in New York. For more information visit Paul’s websites http://paultauterouff.com and http://binghamtonguitarlessons.com.

There are lots of ways to make guitar solos. Most guitarists focus on ‘what to play’ versus ‘how to play things’. Fact is, the nuances of phrasing (‘how’ the notes are played) often matter MORE than the notes we actually play. How many times have you heard someone play a solo ‘without’ much emotion? Often there was nothing wrong with their choice of notes. The solo lacked emotion and interest because the ‘phrasing’ was weak.

Guitar Phrasing is the most important aspect to creating great guitar solos, yet very few guitar players learn to develop this key element of their guitar playing.

One of the best things you can do to make better guitar solos is to carefully study your favorite singers. In the late 1990s, I began to study the vocal styles of my favorite singers. I learned to play on guitar every little nuance of their vocal phrasing and vibrato… and most importantly, the ‘musical contexts’ in which they made various phrasing and vibrato choices when singing. Singers cannot do many of things that we can do on the guitar, but they can naturally and effortlessly do things that are not common (but are still possible) to do on the guitar.

Listen to your favorite singers and notice the difference between their vocal phrasing (‘how’ they sing notes and phrases) and your guitar phrasing (‘how’ you play your notes and phrases). Then listen carefully to how these singers construct their phrases and compare that to how you create your guitar solos. When you really pay attention to this, you will probably make some very cool and powerful observations. This can be one of the best guitar solo lessons you can ever have. It can be a real eye (and ear) opening experience that can lead you to discover MANY new ideas that you can use to make you’re your own great guitar solos.

Here are three things you can learn and implement into your playing immediately so that you can consistently make better guitar solos.

Delayed Vibrato: Listen to how many singers sing a note (without vibrato at first) and then begin to apply vibrato to it a few moments later. The vast majority of guitar players don’t do this when soloing; instead they apply the vibrato immediately to the note. Although this can also sound good, it gets old to always immediately apply vibrato when you use it. So play a note on your guitar, let it ring out naturally (without vibrato) for a moment, then apply vibrato to it. In addition to creating a more ‘vocal style of guitar playing’ you may also notice that the note you just played sustains longer. (more on this in the video below).

Movement between notes: As you know, when playing notes on a piano there is no ability to ‘bend’ notes. Singers frequently ‘bend’ notes in both directions (up or down in pitch), although downward ‘bent’ notes are more common in most vocal styles. Guitar players frequently bend notes, but 99% of the time they only bend notes ‘up’ (in pitch). (more on this in the video below).

Intuitive Emotional Expression: Singers often manipulate tension and dissonance intuitively. They might sing the 9th of a chord because it makes a very specific emotional feeling. Most (non jazz) guitar players would naturally play the root while making a guitar solo (especially at the end of a phrase). This happens because guitar players typically are thinking about patterns and scale positions. And thus the ear is conditioned to ‘find the consonant notes’ when beginning and ending phrases while creating (or improvising) guitar solos. Singers don’t have ‘patterns’ and ‘positions’ to think about. They are only focused on their intuition -- the emotion of each note they sing. This results in more natural options for the singer (compared to many ‘inexperienced’ guitar players) particularly at the beginnings and endings of phrases.

Watch the video below to see exactly what I’m talking about and hear a live demonstration of each.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFtePrgcC0w

To get more help with your guitar playing check out my 10 Free Guitar Solo Tips.

About the author: Tom Hess is a professional guitarist and teaches electric guitar lessons online.

© Tom Hess Music Corporation.

All Rights reserved.

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

But what do we mean by “musicianship?”

What’s the difference between someone who can ‘play a bit of guitar’ and someone who can confidently describe themselves as a musician? What is it exactly that a ‘musician’ can do that a mere ‘guitar player’ can’t?

Let’s take this a radical step further and cut out all thoughts of technique. This isn’t to say technique isn’t important. Far from it! But for the sake of this article let’s look at “musicianship” as a mindset. Better than that, let’s think of the “musicianship” as a point in our lifelong musical journey. We start as a “want-to-be guitar player” and then progress to “guitar player.” “Musician” will be a point further along our road.

Personally I have pinned it down to three specific main skills that have to be mastered to earn your ‘I am a musician’ badge.

These are:

• The ability to improvise music
• The ability to compose music and
• The ability to transcribe music

I consider these skills to interact in a similar way to the three sides of a triangle. If you increase the length of one side of a triangle it forces the length of the adjacent side to increase.

It works like this: if you improve your improvising skill, your ability to compose automatically improves (composing is really just improvising done more slowly!) The insight gained from composing or improvising goes a long way to improving your listening and music analysis skills, which in turn enhance your ability to transcribe music, such as working out a song from a recording you’re listening to so you can write it down on paper in either notation or tablature. Transcribing is really reverse-engineered composing!

The more music you transcribe, the better your understanding of how music works. This newly gained understanding then feeds back into your ability to improvise and compose.

The interesting thing about each of these skills is that they all have a slightly high entry price. Left to their own devices, guitarists seldom teach themselves to improvise without help from a teacher or another musician. Composing music is seen by most as something akin to a black art and, again, few people start composing entirely under their own steam. Demonstrating the ability to instantly transcribe music is even more likely to get you burnt at the stake – I have literally seen students’ jaws drop when witnessing this skill in action.

So if you are teaching yourself to play guitar and want to work towards mastering the subject I recommend starting with improvising. It’s not necessarily the easiest one of the three for everyone, but I think it is slightly more accessible than either composing or transcribing. It’s also more fun!

What’s the best way to learn to improvise? Well, there are several approaches and, to be honest, each approach has its advantages and disadvantages.

The simplest approach is just to start. Play along to a song and use your ears to hear which notes seem to go with it and which ones don’t. This is a very direct approach, but I have to say that most people find it to difficult to get a satisfying result early on and so, for them, I’d recommend approach number two.

The second approach is to learn scale patterns. The most easily applied scales are the minor and major pentatonic scales and their derivatives: the blues and country scales. Drilling scale patterns may seem laborious, but it is a most effective shortcut to finding the right notes to play.

To play Rock ‘n Roll style lead or Jazz, you need to progress to improvising directly over chords. This can be done using the chord shapes themselves (Django Reinhardt, Eddie Cochran and Mark Knopfler are all ace exponents of this approach) or by learning arpeggio patterns (check out Charlie Christian’s jazz style or Joe Walsh on his Hotel California solo).

Improvising directly over chords is, in my view, much harder and takes lots of practice, but ultimately produces a much richer result. If you can, team up with another guitarist and take it in turns to play lead and rhythm. The next best thing is to use backing tracks.

Once your fingers are up to speed (and that can take a while), the most important thing is careful listening. You have to simultaneously listen to three things: (1) The rhythm section, (2) your own playing and, (3) the combined effect of both those things!

The final step is to learn to appreciate the subtle effects of timing. The rhythmic element of great lead guitar is often underestimated. If you listen to B.B. King and Peter Green you can really appreciate what can be achieved with only a few notes but a divine sense of timing!

Once you feel you’re getting the hang of improvising have a go at composing. Record yourself playing a simple chord sequence then play it back, and using your improvising skills, work out a great tune to go with it. If you have the right kit to do multi-track recording you can then record yourself playing the tune and listen appreciatively to the playback! Like improvising, your composing skills will develop with practice and will benefit from swapping ideas with fellow guitar players and other musicians as well.

Finally, have a crack at transcribing. Listen to a song and work out in this order:

1. What key it’s in.
2. What notes the bass is playing under the chord changes.
3. What the chords are.
4. What the melody is.
5. Any lead lines, keyboard or horn parts.

If you have studied any amount of music theory you will find that will help greatly in narrowing down the likely chords and notes used. If you struggle with music theory (and in that case, welcome to one of the largest clubs on earth!) you will find transcribing harder, but if you stick at it you will gradually gain an intuitive understanding of how chords and notes work together in keys to form music. You will then find the theory making a lot more sense.

So use the Magic Triangle of Improvising, Composing and Transcribing to work your way up from being ‘a bit of a guitar player’ to being a fully competent Musician and above all enjoy the process!

About the author:

Nick Minnion runs TeachGuitar.com, a website designed to support guitar players who want to make a living teaching guitar. Visit teachguitar.com for loads of free resources to help you get into teaching guitar and also probably the biggest global forum for active guitar teachers.www.teachguitar.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What is the major scale?
• How do I build minor scales?
• What are modes?
• How do I build modal scales?
• How do I take a scale and make it into a solo?
• How do I know what notes I can use in a solo?
• Which mode should I use?
• How do I get away from pentatonics when soloing?
• How do I move a scale from one key to another?
• How do I use scales to play guitar fills?
• If the major scale is comprised of 8 notes where is the 8th note?
• How are Indian notes matched with the western scale?
• What are some scales and chords used in celtic music?

What is the major scale?

The major scale consists of eight notes. The first three notes are whole steps, followed by a half step, then three more whole steps and then a final half step (remember that each fret on the guitar is a half step).

Using the key of C the scale is as follows:

To find out what all this knowledge is good for check out the article Theory Without Tears.

How do I build minor scales?

We know that for every major key, there is also a corresponding minor key. We also know (if we remember our discussion on relative minors in Happy New Ear) that, since C is the VI in the key of Eb major, C minor is the relative minor of Eb major. What you may not know is that there are three traditional minor scales for any given minor scale.

The natural minor scale is simply the C major scale written in the key of Eb major. It incorporates all the flats one finds in that key (Bb, Eb and Ab). If you can figure out what major key your relative minor belongs to, then you should be able to write out the natural minor scale without a problem.

And harmonic minor scales as well. The only difference between the harmonic minor scale and the natural minor scale is the VII note. The striking thing about this scale is the interval between the VI and the VII, now a step and a half. This gives the scale an eastern feel to it.

Melodic minor scales muddle things even further by having the gall to be totally different depending on which way you are going. The ascending scale is just the C major scale with a minor third instead of the regular third (Eb instead of E). The descending melodic minor scale is the same as the natural minor. This may sound silly, but I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the step by step (or half step in some cases) intervals in a descending natural or melodic minor scale are the same as the intervals in the ascending major.

To find get some clear examples and find out more on minor scales take a look at the article Scales Within Scales.

What are modes?

A lot of people look at modes as if it were a big mystery, but they are really a fairly simple concept once you learn how to use them on guitar. There are seven tones to the major scale hence there are seven modes to the major scale.

Here are the modes of the major scale.

You simply take a note out of the major scale and play it as if that where the root. So if you start on C and end on C you are in C ionian. Now to find your relative minor simply go down three scale degrees from your root or up five. So the Relative minor of Cmaj is Amin. To find you relative major if you are in minor do the opposite. It also sounds really cool to play the major scale and it’s relative minor ate the same time. This is called harmonizing.

Really there is no mystery in modes or theory at all. The only reason why there is a so called mystery is because for some reason people start off learning songs and generally all they ever do is learn songs and copy licks instead of actually learning their instrument.

For a more thorough examination of modes and their uses check out the article Modal Thinking.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to modes and select edit to make improvements.

How do I build modal scales?

In addition to the three minor scales (natural, harmonic and melodic), there are also quite a number of modal scales. “Modal” is one of those theory terms that gives people the willies. If you want a much more scholarly approach, I suggest you check out Jimmy Hudson’s column entitled Modal Thinking or pick up your favorite textbook. For me, it is easier to think in terms of food. Your C major scale is your steak or chicken or soup stock or whatever you decide to start out with (hey, I never said this was going to be a great analogy…). The various flats and sharps that you can throw in are simply spices that will gives different flavors to your scale depending on the combination of spices you decide to use.

Most people learn various modal scales in order to develop different style for leads and solos. Some prefer to use them in order to spice up their songwriting. Bass players can utilize them to create astonishingly beautiful bass lines. Anyway you look at it your knowledge of minor and modal will augment your abilities.

There are some practical examples and uses for modal scales in the article Scales Within Scales.

How do I take a scale and make it into a solo?

Most solos are the result of planning. The guitarists involved know how many measures are involved or what chord changes are taking place underneath the solo. The good lead guitarists will construct a solo, giving it the same qualities of a well-written song – a beginning, a middle and an end as well as points of dynamic tension and release. Leads generally fall into one of the following categories: “rhythmic,” “melodic,” “slashing” and “effects.” They’re pretty self-explanatory and can often overlap. With a fair degree of practice and a backlog of riffs, just about anybody can come up with their own guitar solos.

For a complete answer head over to How do I take a scale and make it into a solo? A lesson on melodic solos, with a step by step guide to constructing a lead part, can be found in the article Leading Questions. Also don’t miss our series of lessons on creating solos, starting with Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1.

How do I know what notes I can use in a solo?

There’s actually a little more to it than simply knowing what key the song is in, but let’s start simply. The easiest way to tell what key a song is in is to look at the sheet music. The number of flats or sharps will pretty much tell you. Chances are, though, that you rarely use sheet music. You’re more likely to have a sheet which has the chord progression. (And to be honset with you, the chord progression is a lot more important than the key but we’ll come back to that…) If you look at the chord progressions of a song, the chances are pretty likely that the song is grouped into patterns of progressions. Usually, but not always, a song will begin and end on the chord of its key. Also, if you listen to the song, there are places where it just sounds like it comes to a conclusion and that will almost always be the same chord.

Knowing what I call the “primary and secondary chords” of any major key can be very useful to you. For instance, if you see that a song has G, A, D, Bm and F#m chords in it, you can make an educated guess that it is in the key of D major. Bm and A major are also possibilities and you’d have to listen to the song to know for sure, but look – you’ve narrowed it down to three of the twenty possibilities! That’s a great start. If you want to know more about how to figure out the primary and secondary chords of any key, read my article The Power of Three.

But you will find out that knowing the key is not always an indicator of what notes to use. This is why knowing some theory will help you out a lot. Take the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil. This song is in the key of E but the chord progression is E, D, A, E. I’m sure you know that the D note is not part of the E major scale. So what do we do? Well, if you know modal scales, an E Dorian scale (E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D, E) will work very well. You may not think that the G would work but it provides what is called a “blue note” that gives some nice tension to the proceedings provided you do not just sit on it for a long period of time. Sometimes it is a lot easier to look at the chord progression and think, “Okay, what key would normally have all these chords” and then work from there.

Another thing that works quite well fairly often is to use the relative minor pentatonic scale. If you know a song is in G major, for example, soloing in the E minor pentatonic scale (E, G, A, B, D) will sound perfectly fine.

I hope that I’ve demonstated here that while knowing the key of a song is very important, it’s also just as important to carefully examine the chord progession when trying to figure out what notes you want to use to solo.

Check out our series of lessons on creating solos, starting with Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1.

Which mode should I use?

D Ionian is the same thing as D major. D Lydian is the same thing as A major but starting, or emphasizing the D. You can start with any note you choose to. But keep in mind that in order to have the feel that your solo is going somewhere along with the chords, the solo should contain elements from the chords. That’s where modes come in. If you are in the key of D Major. The Chord A Major can be found in it. Over that chord I would play A Mixolydian or C# Locrian or E Dorian. These are elements from the chord that are going to be emphasized by the mode being played over it. There are other scales that can be played over this, but this should get you started.

How do I get away from pentatonics when soloing?

This is one of the problems when people learn to only use scales in terms of leads and improvising. Solos can be thought of as songs within songs – with their own melodies and dynamic tension. If you haven’t done so yet, you might want to read Leading Questions and Picture In Dorian Gray.

Also, we’re in the process of putting together quite a few articles on soloing and improvisation that might interest you. What I’d recommend is to start looking outside of your normal style for a while. Check out Gilbert Isbin’s piece on fingerstyle. This shows how different chord voicings can lead to interesting improv ideas: Improvisation for the Fingerstyle guitarist.

Look out for our new articles where we’ll be dissecting other people’s solos and seeing how they tend to come from a combination of scales and chord voicings. We’ll also work on constructing some of our own.

Also, and this is incredibly important, listen to how other instruments solo. Trying to imitate phrasings other than the guitar can also inspire you to new things.

On Guitar Noise you will find more than a month’s worth of articles on this topic on the soloing and improvisation page.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to improvising and select edit to make improvements.

How do I move a scale from one key to another?

What you want to do is to look at your scale positions that you already know and figure out two things: the note on the 6th string and its relationship to your pentatonic scale. Since you are using an Em pentatonic scale (and we know that the notes are E G A B D E, let’s look at what you already know:

Pos 1- 0 open E (root) on sixth string
Pos 2- 3 fret G (3rd)
Pos 3- 5 fret A (4th)
Pos 4- 7 fret B (5th)
Pos 5- 10 fret D (7th)

Now since we know that a Dm pentatonic scale is D F G A C D, then we can just look at where these notes fall into place on the sixth string and our patterns will remain the same (unless we have open strings to deal with):

Pos 1- 10th fret D (root) on sixth string
Pos 2- 1st or 13th fret F (3rd) – on 1st fret watch for open strings
Pos 3- 3rd fret G (4th)
pos 4- 5th fret A (5th)
Pos 5- 8th fret C (7th)

See how easy it is?

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to transposing and select edit to make improvements.

How do I use scales to play guitar fills?

If you listen to good guitarists you’ll note that they often put in a riff or a run of notes when changing from one chord to the next. It’s usually very short and rarely complicated – a hammer on here, a pick off there, maybe a bit of a scale. But for all its simplicity it adds a great deal of flair to your playing. A fill is nothing more than an interesting transition from one chord to another. Often what keeps a good beginner or intermediate from making the next step forward is an inability to incorporate fills into his or her playing.

The simplest fills are best summed up by that wonderful cliché “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” You’re on a C chord (in a song conveniently in the key of C major). The next chord in the song is a G. All you have to do is walk up (or down) the C major scale to G. Pretty easy, isn’t it?

There is a lot more said about this in the article All Down The Line.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to guitar fills and select edit to make improvements.

If the major scale is comprised of 8 notes where is the 8th note?

This is one of those “quirks” of music. Let me see if I can explain it in one shot.

When you see the major scale written as “1W, 1W, 1H, 1W, 1W, 1W, 1H” you have to realize that you’re NOT counting your starting note! No lie! Whoever came up with this system takes it for granted that you’re going to know your root note and then continue from there. It’s not where is the 8th note, but rather where is the first note. Technically, this should be written as “Root, 1W, 1W, 1H, 1W, 1W, 1W, 1H” That gives you the root on both ends and all should be well with the world.

So in the case of the D major scale, it would be:

(root)
D
then one whole step (1W) to
E then another whole step (1W) to
F# – and not F as you have it
then your half step (1H) to
G
then three whole steps to
A, B and C# (not C)
and then the final half step (1H) to
D

How are Indian notes matched with the western scale?

First, I have to tell you that I am not absolutely positive about this, but I will do my best to check it out to make sure. In most cultures, when a basic scale is sung out in notes it is generally taken to mean that it is the simplest scale possible, which in this case would be the C major scale. I am making this judgment solely upon the similarities I encountered in Greece when a musician would tell me that a song was in “Re” or “La minor.” I have also run into this when playing with some people here in Chicago who play South American (Peruvian, in this case) music and we need to find our common knowledge in terms of keys.

I was able to do some research this morning and, based upon what I’ve learned so far, I think that this line of thinking should be correct. According to what I have learned, there are twelve tones (swara) in the Indian music system (although I think I should say the North Indian, correct?) and when they are arranged from end to end, from Sa to Sa, the flats and sharps do indeed correspond to those on a C major scale.

So, as far as I can tell, ‘Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni’ would be matched with ‘Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti’ which in turn would be matched to the notes ‘C D E F G A B’

What are some scales and chords used in celtic music?

One of the common misconceptions about Celtic music (not to mention all sorts of other genres) is that it contains different chords and/or scales than other music. Now while Celtic music may have a lot of “character traits” for lack of a better term, it still uses the chords and scales with which you are already familiar.

Most traditional music, including Celtic, was old long before the guitar even came around. Hence a lot of the flavor of Celtic guitar style comes from trying to get your guitar to mimic the nuances of the older instruments associated with the Celtic traditions – which would mean a lot of harps, fiddles and pipes. Having a lot of open, ringing strings creates both the sound of the harp and the drone of the pipes. This is why a lot of guitarists who specialize in Celtic music prefer either drop D or DADGAD tuning (which you can find out about in my column On The Tuning Awry), it gives a lot of opportunities for open drones in fifths. Say you’re playing a solo in the key of D. You can use your lower three strings as a drone and play a melodic lead on your high strings at the same time.

A further way to imitate the pipes is to use a lot of “trilling” effects – such as hammer-ons and pull-offs. If you listen to Celtic music (and listening to any traditional music is the best way to come up with ideas) there is a lilting quality to it. Melodies flit about in a very ornate style. You cannot add too many trills. Another cool technique is to use vibrato on various notes. Not typical guitar vibrato (where you slide your finger back and forth along the string) but rather hard vibrato where you move your finger PERPENDICULAR to the string. This will cause your melodies to occasionally go slightly sharp or flat, but this again gives the impression of the instruments not being perfect. Well placed bends can also do this.

For even more on playing celtic style music check out the article A Celtic Air and a whole series of celtic song arrangements by Doug Sparling on the celtic music page.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Celtic music and select edit to make improvements.

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

When we first learn to improvise, it’s magic. Melodies struggle to emerge, but emerge they do, and boy, we know we’re on the way to being a Rock Star.

Now, since we’ve jammed on the exercises presented in “A beginner’s guide to soloing,” a few questions start to surface:

Where next?

There are a few things you should learn. I don’t usually say “should,” but I mean it this time. You should learn:

1. The major scale and its seven variations, called modes.
2. The pentatonic scale and its five variations.

While there are many other scales that are useful to our purposes, these are the perfect starting point. Modes often confuse even veteran players, and while their theory and application requires more than a few lines, here’s a brief explanation.

If we play a major scale starting on a note other than its root note, that resulting shape is a mode. For example, if we play C major starting on C, that’s a C major scale. But if we play the same notes in the key of C, but we start on D, the pattern would be called the second mode of C major, or D Dorian to be exact.

To help visualize this, picture a piano. Playing the white keys, starting on C, we automatically sound a C major scale. Now, instead of starting on C, we start on the next key, D. From D to D, still playing the white keys, we end up with a D Dorian mode, the second mode of C Major.

Since there are seven notes in the Major scale, there are seven possible starting places to play our variations. Hence, we end up with seven distinct patterns to play on the guitar.

Carrying this to a different application, we arrive at pentatonic scales. As the pentatonic scale contains five notes, logic has it that we have five patterns built from that scale.

5 Pentatonics +7 modes = 12 shapes.

Twelve shapes. Learn them. Now.
(See chart at the end of the article.)

Also, check out some of the other articles here at Guitar Noise, such as Scaling the Heights and A la Modal for more discussion on the topic of Pentatonic Scales and the various modes of the Major Scale.

I don’t want to sound like a classic rock band – What should I do?

Some folks want to sound jazzy, metal, or hardcore. They may be wondering if learning a scale such as the Pentatonic Minor, will inhibit their inherent “punkiness.” And perhaps major scales are too happy sounding? Well, my grandmother uses the same words that I do, but we don’t sound alike. While we both use the same words, our inflections, tone, and sentence construction are vastly different. Both Metallica and Mozart use the same notes, but style is what sets them apart. Using a certain scale will not always make you sound a certain way. Sure, some scales are bluesy by nature, but style is what truly defines genre.

This runs the other way, too. I use the same scales as Stevie Ray Vaughan, but much to my dismay, I sure don’t sound like him!

However, there are common applications. Blues musicians have generally favored the pentatonic sound, while the shredders of the 80’s made frequent use of the modes, as well as exotic scales.

The answer? There are only twelve shapes presented in this lesson. Learn them, and decide for yourself. It certainly won’t hurt you.

I’m just a rock ‘n roll rebel, I don’t need no scales

Actually, you’re right! (And that’s a great Ozzy song.)

Check this out: There’s only twelve notes in the system of Western music.

A scale is seven of those twelve notes. It’s a sonic recipe that we just happen to accept.

So, chances are, if you’re not consciously using scales as of now, you might just be stumbling into them on your own.

The last thing I want to do is to stifle your creativity, and stomp out your musical spark.

No, sir! I’m offering you a shortcut. Yep. These shapes can actually help you be more creative, free, and rocking by not having to guess! Why “reinvent the Strat” when it can be understood in a few hours?

If you want to be truly rebellious, you need to know the rules in order to break them. And the ability to solo over the entire neck is a maverick goal, indeed. You’ll surely kick butt and take names with your newfound fretboard skills…Well, maybe.

Scales are just the beginning.

They’re the rules, and musical rules should never be taken too seriously!

While it is important to internalize and digest the shapes, I think Charlie Parker put it best when he was quoted saying “Learn the changes, and then forget them.”

Our goal is to know the shapes so well that we don’t have to think when we improvise. Mental effort generally doesn’t sound good.

There’s only twelve notes, so don’t get bogged down in them. Remember, while there’s a limited number of tones, there’s an infinite way to express them. After all, we’re trying to express music, not scales.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve gotten the hang of expressing with a minor pentatonic scale, have fun learning to talk with these new shapes. The patterns below will grant you freedom over the entire guitar neck, not just a position.

Don’t get stuck in the shapes, and feel free to add chromatic, or passing, tones to the scale. These are fancy words for “wrong” notes, or notes outside of the scale.

Beware: You may find that you can’t express with the Major Scale shapes as easily. That’s okay, and natural at first. They’re harder to digest, and contain several notes that aren’t as user-friendly as the pentatonic scale. Technically speaking, the fourth and seventh degrees of the Major Scale don’t sound too hot when you end a line on them. But, that’s the subject of another article. Experiment, get the sounds under your fingers, and keep at it.

Rock on! And don’t forget my blog!

The Major Scale and it’s Seven Modes

Note: These examples are written in the key of F major. Due to the layout of the guitar, I find this key easiest to visualize. Of course, all shapes are movable. To transpose to a different key, simply move the scales up or down.

The Minor Pentatonic Scale and it’s five modes, Key of A Minor

Also check out… A Beginner’s Guide to Soloing – Part 1

Step 1. The map

The map for this lesson’s quest is the A minor Pentatonic scale, outlined in Example 1. This is a handy little scale with a big name. Breaking it down, Penta means “five” and tonic refers to tones. So, we have a five-tone minor scale. Nothing too hard about that, right?

Play this scale a few times to get it under your fingers. The eventual goal is to know it so well that you can play it without conscious thought. If you can do so and carry on a conversation at the same time, good job.

Step 2 (optional.) The rhythm

To paint sonic art, we need a canvas on which to do so. This platform is the rhythm guitar’s part. The A minor Pentatonic scale, and its parent scale, A natural minor, contain the notes to build several chords. The A minor chord that is found among the scale is an ideal candidate for our foundation of future greatness in improvisation! We’ll choose this chord for our exercise. By the way, this chord is constructed of the notes A, C, and E.

Get a buddy, keyboard, or backing track to hold down a steady rhythm of just an A minor chord. The idea is to provide a backdrop for you to solo over.

Step 3. Show time

Armed with your scale, a sense of adventure and trusty friend or backing track, it’s time to conquer soloing!

A: Play your scale in order, ascending, and then descending. Listen to how it sounds against the A minor chord.
B: Play your scale in the same order, but hold some notes longer than others. Play a few fast, then some slow, and see what sounds you get.
C: Repeat step B, and this time, repeat some of the notes.
D: Start to mix up the order of the notes. Skip a few, repeat some, and jump around.Be creative! Approach the scale as a skateboarder would look at a flight of stairs – don’t just walk up and down ‘em!
E: Add seasonings. Bends, slides, pull-offs and hammer-ons are to be tried. Picture the solo as a salad, and these articulations are the bacon bits. See Example 2. for further ideas.

Breakdown

OK, so what just happened? Hopefully, you will have taken the scale, listened to it in its basic form, and then started to spin some melodies from its framework. At the end of the day, the goal is to play music, not scales. I’ll often see students playing scales very well, but not knowing what to do with them. Simple steps such as these can be very helpful. Remember, it’s not magic. You can do it, and before you know it, you’ll be soloing like an old pro.

If any of these concepts don’t click, or if you’re having trouble getting the hang of it, drop me an email! I’ll be glad to help you out.

And don’t forget there are lots of lessons here at Guitar Noise on soloing and improvising. You’ll also find many lessons of scales themselves.

Rock on! And for more ideas, don’t forget to check out my blog!

Also check out… A Beginner’s Guide to Soloing – Part 2

Now on to the goods…

Here are four very common repeating licks, all notated in the key of A.

The first repeating lick is one of the first licks I learned on guitar. If you’ve heard a rock guitar solo, you’ve heard this lick. Ace Frehley of Kiss uses it extensively.

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

The next repeating lick is a variation of the first lick. I believe this lick can be heard in Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd (it’s in the key of G on that particular recording).

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

The third repeating lick is a triplet lick reminiscent of Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.

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

The last repeating lick of this lesson is one I learned from Terry Kath’s guitar solo in the song 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago.

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

All the MP3 files that accompany this lesson were recorded at 90 BPM, in case you’re interested. This lesson was a lot of fun to put together, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it too.

The rock solo, be it improvisational or orchestrated, is in some ways the quintessential “guitar sound.” For many of us, the dream of playing one really great solo is more or less why we keep strapping up and plugging in. For the more proficient, the power of personal expression in owning a solo is often the height of our playing experience. In any case, for those of us who love the rock guitar sound, listening to a few great soloists now and again is a great way to help our own playing advance, if only a little bit.

As always the number of really great guitarists is much greater than the length of time given to write an article, besides, it’s more fun to focus on a few really fantastic players and then discuss how those players inspire us, and who else inspires us as well.

I’m not going to point out the folks we’ve all heard. Sure Page’s solos are remarkable; and there is no doubt that Gilmour’s play is worth listening too; and who doesn’t think Allen Collins’ playing on Skynyrd’s Freebird is worth hearing over and over again? My purpose isn’t to point out the great players with whom we’re already familiar; rather, my purpose is to provide a glimpse at some of the lesser-known, but still great players who can expand our own guitar playing (and listening) horizons.

John Petrucci (Dream Theater, Liquid Tension Experiment, Age of Impact, solo)

I first heard Under a Glass Moon at the urging of a friend whose primary genre is mellow smooth jazz. I was blown away. The oddness of having a smooth jazz fan recommending progressive metal is soon lost once you start listening. John Petrucci is all about good music.

Petrucci grew up on Long Island, NY, and attended school with fellow Dream Theater musician John Myung. He started playing guitar in seriousness when he was 12 years old. Myung and Petrucci both ended up at Berklee together, and there formed Dream Theater.

Dream Theater is an amazing band, great musicianship from all quarters combined with an excellent understanding of composition makes this progressive metal band readily accessible to even non-metal heads.

The entire Dream Theater back catalog is worth owning. There simply isn’t a bad disk in the mix. Live at Budokan is a great live recording that captures the magic of the band in a great concert performance. Images and Words presents some of Petrucci’s best work in the track Under a Glass Moon.

Jeff Beck (Lord Sutch, Yardbirds, Honeydrippers, Beck, Bogert & Appice, Jeff Beck Group, solo)

Beck has never been the household name fellow Yardbird Clapton became, nor has he been seen as visionary as Page, though he is at least as innovative. Beck’s lack of commercial success and popular recognition may be due largely to Beck moving from jazz fusion to heavy metal to easy listening and back whenever the mood struck him. This lack of focus on a single genre makes it hard to sell a record and an artist.

Still, his great sounds leave little doubt that Beck is a worthy guitar idol.

Beck attended Wimbledon Art College where he was able to parlay his work with Lord Sutch into the lead guitarist role with the Yardbirds after Clapton left. (As an aside, if you aren’t familiar with Lord Sutch, you’re missing a wonderful bit of music and anti-cultural history!)

After 2 years with the Yardbirds, Beck “retired” only to return to the music scene in 1967 with the Jeff Beck Group, which included Ron Wood on bass and Rod Stewart on vocals. Even though neither of the groups’ two albums prior to Wood and Stewart’s departure in 1970 were particularly successful commercially, the sound they created was an innovative addition to what would become heavy metal.

Beck re-formed the Jeff Beck Group, but it never had the power of the original line-up. He joined with Appice and Bogart in 1972, but never went anywhere as their lone Japanese release suffered from weak arrangements and poor performances all around.

In 1975 Beck emerged from an 18-month hiatus with a rock/jazz fusion album. After the jazz foray, Beck retired again, but soon returned with a new offering. Beck sometimes teams up with other musicians and artists, such as Roger Waters, Mick Jagger (on his second solo album), and others, but his best work is undoubtedly his solo material.

He’s still going strong, his latest album, the 2003 Epic label release Jeff is well worth the price of admission. Still, if you’re just looking for the seminal Jeff Beck disc, you have to look to the first two Jeff Beck group albums, Truth and Beck-Ola.

Richie Blackmore (Blackmore’s Night, The Lancasters, Rainbow, Deep Purple)

Blackmore started life as a session guitarist before becoming one of the founding members of Deep Purple in 1968. He stayed on for twelve albums before leaving the group in 1975 when he formed Rainbow with the remains of the New York group Elf.

Rainbow suffered from a continuous string of personnel changes, and never seemed to really find a lasting combination. The second and third Rainbow albums, with Ronnie James Dio on vocals, Jim Bain on bass, Tony Carey on keyboards, and former Jeff Beck Group drummer Cozy Powell were some of the best offerings. Dio stayed on for a fourth album but left half-way through the recording of their fifth. After Dio left, the band seemed to lose it’s magic. Rainbow disbanded in 1984 after eight albums and Blackmore joined a reformed version of Deep Purple.

Blackmore has a huge discography. Some of the more “shouldn’t miss material” includes the CD Take It!, a 1994 release of Blackmore’s studio work for producer Joe Meek. It’s amazing to hear how one great guitarist can totally lift an otherwise horribly bad recording! More conventional recommendations for Blackmore’s work include the seminal Deep Purple album Machine Head. Released in 1974, this album is in many ways the triumphant maturing of Heavy Metal into a genre all its own. Sure, there are earlier examples of the musical stylings that would mark Metal as a style. But few albums captured the minds of other musicians the way Machine Head did. I remember as a kid listening to Blackmore’s solo work on the track Lazy with my friends over and over and over again. It still is an awe-inspiring track. And since 1974, what guitar player hasn’t learned Smoke on the Water? It was an instant standard.

Dimebag Darrell (Pantera, Damageplan)

Born Darrell Lance Abbott in 1966 in Dallas Texas, Pantera’s lead guitarist learned his chops imitating Kiss’ Ace Frehley. He co-founded Pantera in the mid-80’s with his brother, drummer Vinnie Paul, and bassist Rex Smith. Their early recordings are really fairly pedestrian offerings of an average metal band. Fed on a heavy diet of Zepplin, Def Leppard, Judas Priest and Deep Purple, the early songs have a predictable, amateurish feel to them.

After lead singer Terry Glaze left after the third album, the group found their own way with new singer Phil Anselmo. By 1990 they had signed with a major label, received some high end production advice and backing, and began tearing up the metal charts.

Sadly, in December of last year (2004) Darrell was shot by a member of the audience while on stage in Columbus, Ohio. Dead at only thirty-eight years of age, the rock world lost a true visionary. Darrell’s death was a loss to metal on par with the death of Stevie Ray Vaughn on the blues/rock world.

Darrell’s shred technique is second to none. He’s been recognized as a real genius of the metal realms and was often invited to appear on other artists’ recordings. On top of that, he’s remembered as a very down-to-earth, approachable person. Numerous Texan musicians will tell stories of Darrell coming up to talk to them after a show in one club or another in Dallas or Austin.

It’s hard to go wrong with any Pantera release in the post-Glaze era, but Vulgar Display of Power has been called “one of the most influential heavy metal albums.” Perhaps the best track for displaying Dimebag Darrell’s fabulous gift, though, is the track Floods from the 1996 release The Great Southern Trendkill.

Frank Zappa (Frank Zappa and the Mother’s of Invention, solo)

Frank Zappa is perhaps the most under-appreciated musical artist of the last century. A composer with stunning range and command, a band-leader with extraordinary charisma and presence, and a guitar virtuoso, Zappa simply defined excellence in everything he did.

Sadly, Zappa seems to be remembered more for his non-conformity and his children’s odd names than for his musical talents. He started composing seriously in high school, and was largely self-taught. He managed to write the score for a B-movie while still in High School, which included a piece written for a fifty-two piece orchestra.

As a composer, Zappa will surely be being appreciated for his genius for decades to come.

As a producer and label owner, Zappa was largely responsible for a host of artists getting their starts: Alice Cooper, Captain Beefheart, GTOs, Tim Buckley, and The Persuasions.

Zappa was also a political activist driven by his distrust of authority and big government. He played an important part in the Parents Music Resource Center hearings in Washington in the early 1980’s. And then turned around and used sound clips from the hearing for the twelve minute long Porn Wars.

But it as a guitarist that Zappa is most often imitated, but least often appreciated. One of the more amazing bits of Zappa’s history is that he recorded nearly every one of his performances. In the mid-1970’s Steve Vai began the job of transcribing Zappa’s guitar solo’s. The result was released as a three hundred page book of guitar solos, which contain some of the weirdest rhythmic groupings imaginable, but whose sound is amazing.

Zappa released several of his best guitar solo’s in the two collections, the three album set Shut Up and Play Your Guitar and the 1987 2-CD release Guitar. Both are still available on CD.

Of course, these artists are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to great solos. I’m sure you have your own favorites as well. If you have any comments on these artists, or other artists you’d like to see reviewed, please write me at david.wagle@gmail.com.

Until next time – Happy Listening!

Many people start playing guitar with visions of hour-long jams where the music just keeps on flowing. Unfortunately for quite a few of these players, they end up thinking that soloing or improvising isn’t for them. They believe that it’s some kind of magic only a few gifted people possess. Over the course of a few articles, I hope to take away this unwanted feeling by giving a step-by-step guide on how to improvise. In this first article we’ll start with the very basics, that is, the 12-bar blues and the pentatonic scale.

12-bar blues

For the rest of this article, we’ll be using the concept of the 12-bar blues and playing it in the key of A major. In case you didn’t know, the 12-bar blues is a chord progression of you guessed it, 12 bars or measures. It consists of three chords:

So when we play in the key of A major, we would use these chords:

While, at least for the rest of this article, you don’t really need to be able to play such a progression, it is quite important to have a feel for how it sounds. You can read more about the 12-bar blues in David’s article Before You Accuse Me.

Pentatonic Minor scale.

One of the most-used scales in blues and rock music is the pentatonic scale, and we’ll be using this very scale for most of this small series of articles. The pentatonic minor scale is basically a simplified version of the natural minor scale. Take a look at the following table, showing the natural minor and pentatonic minor scales in the key of A:

So in other words, the A minor pentatonic scale consists of the following notes: A, C, D, E, G. The easiest way to learning where all these notes are is by dividing the neck into small areas, called ‘boxes’. To keep it simple, we’ll just introduce the first box this article, and introduce others in future articles. This first box starts at the 5 th fret of the 6 th string, and goes all the way up to the 8 th fret of the 1 st string, as shown below.

Before we’ll do anything else, we must make sure we know this box inside out, and the rest of this article contains a bunch of exercises to practice this scale.

The first one is the most boring one, but there really is no way around it. Grab yourself a metronome, set it to a slow tempo, and play the following tab repeatedly. Fret each note at the 5 th fret with your index finger, each note at the 6 th fret with your middle finger, each note at the 7 th fret with your ring-finger and each note at the 8 th fret with your pinky. Make sure each note rings clearly. When you are comfortable playing the scale, increase the tempo of the metronome slightly and start again.

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

When you notice you fingers can keep on playing the scale without you having to look at the tab it is time for the next exercise. This one involves string skipping, which simply means not always playing the string adjacent to the one you’re on. Initially, this can be tricky:

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Once again, start at a slow tempo and gradually increase it. When you can play this tab comfortably, move on to the next one.

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

Okay, so now you probably now where the notes of the scale are in this box, but do you also know the names of each note you play? If not, then this needs lot be learned. Look back to the table above, and notice that there are three red ‘A’ notes. Since this is in the key of A, we call this A note the “root” note. Before anything else, it is absolutely vital you always know where the root notes are. In our example in the key of A major, you will find them at the following locations on your fretboard:

• 5 th fret of the 6 th string.
• 7 th fret of the 4 th string
• 5 th fret of the 1 st string.

Now go back and play the first tab again, but every time you reach a root note you:

• A) Stop playing.
• B) Listen closely to the sound of the note
• C) Say “root – A” to yourself.
• D) Continue with the tab.

Do this a few times and then try both of the other exercises using the same procedure. When you are comfortable with this and can find the three root notes accurately and fast, it is time to learn the other notes. Make sure you not only say the name of the note, but also the number that belongs to it. Practice this in the same way as you practiced the root note, and in the following order:

• 5 th E
• 3 rd C
• 7 th G
• 4 th D

Congratulations! You now know all the notes of the pentatonic minor scale in A, and because you learned the numbers that belonged to it, you will later find it just as easy to find notes when playing in other keys.

The minor blues scale

“What, another scale?” you might be thinking now. Don’t worry! The blues scale is pretty much a pentatonic minor scale with just one tiny note added. This is the flatted fifth (designated “bV”) and is called the “blue note.” As you will later find out, this note can really add that bluesy touch to what you are playing. See the table below to see where this blue note can be found in the first box of the A-minor pentatonic scale.

Now just play the three exercises again, playing the blue notes before you would otherwise play an E note. Don’t forget to use the same procedure to remember its name, saying “blue note – Eb” to yourself when you play one.

Final exercise

The last thing we’ll do in this article might seem very unfair, but it really isn’t just here to frustrate you (no, really…). We’ll end this article by giving three MIDI backing tracks, and the goal is to simply play over it using the A-minor blues scale. You can play any of the tabs given above, or just play something else, it really doesn’t matter. The goal is to get a better feeling of how a blues-bar sounds. Just relax, play and listen to yourself. Try to hear what does and what doesn’t sound very good, and don’t worry if it doesn’t sound superb yet. We’ve barely started the journey into the land of improvisation, so just sit back and enjoy!

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

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

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

And for those who are curious, our next article will deal with various techniques like bending and hammer-ons, and will bring some sort of structure to how you can improvise. Plus, we’ll introduce a new box.

Today we’ll take some of these elements and add a little more depth to them. We’ll also look at the ideas of structure and targeting. And since we’ve got a full plate anyway, what say we take a short look at bending strings as well?

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.

I’d like to do all these things by examining a solo that already exists. It’s a good idea to start out with a solo that fits the criteria I set forth in an old column of mine, Leading Questions, meaning I’d like it to be short, slow (relatively, anyway) and simple (again, not too simple – we should have a bit of a challenge, no?). And it’s singable, too! So I’ve called upon Lindsay Buckingham’s brief solo in the original recording of Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide, taken from the group’s self-titled album of 1975 to help us out. By the way, if you haven’t read Leading Questions, I heartily advise that you do so now! We’ll wait!

While learning to play leads by copying others’ solos is a time-honored practice, you can lose something by doing so. We can never go into Lindsay Buckingham’s head as he came up with this little lead, perhaps saying to himself, “Let’s use a Bb major scale!” anymore than we can say whether or not he put any more thought into it other than, “Hey! This sounds cool!” So we can never truly know how much of what we examine today was thought out beforehand back then. But that doesn’t mean that things like structure and motifs were totally ignored, either. Most professional musicians (not to mention non-musicians!) will tell you that good solos usually are structured like good songs.

So it’s up to you to understand the why of learning solos this way. And the chances are that the reasons will be different for each of you depending on where you are at this point of your guitar-life. Some of you may simply want to learn this one particular lead. Others may be looking to make that leap across the seeming chasm that exists between knowing a scale and creating an interesting solo with it. Still others may be interested in examining the use of bends to add more depth to your knowledge of scales.

These reasons, and others, are the difference between studying a solo and merely copying one. Just like I tell you in the various song lessons here at Guitar Noise, practically every bit of music you learn can be applied somewhere else. And while I can try to coach you in using the knowledge you gain, you have to open your ears and minds to the chances of doing so.

Back to the task at hand, this particular solo comes a little more than halfway into this particular song, serving as a brief interlude between two identical bridges:

Well I’ve been afraid of changing
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder even children get older
And I’m getting older too

Landslide, on the original recording, is in the key of Eb. If you’ve read the lesson Laura Lasley and I wrote on this song, you already know that it’s fairly simple in terms of chord progression. The entire song, except for the first line of the bridge, consists of this two-measure sequence:

Buckingham plays his solo over four repetitions of these two measures and it ends when the bridge, which starts on a Bb chord, begins again. What I’ve done here is taken the melody of the solo and written it out for you:

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

This is the “no-frills” version of this solo. I’ve simply notated the notes of the melody and nothing more. By the way, if you’re one who’s interested in this sort of thing, on these MP3s I am playing a Fender Stratocaster with the “five way” selector on the neck pickup. The tone is as clean as I could make it.

Please make note of the fact that I wrote the notation of this lead an octave lower than the actual notation would normally be written. There’s a reason for this; since I want you to be able to make connections between the notes on the staff and the scales which we’ll be examining momentarily, I don’t want you to also worry about reading the notes way above the staff line. I hope this isn’t too confusing.

First, I’d like you to examine this in terms of structure. You can divide the solo into two basic sections: part one is the first four measures and part two consists of measures five through eight (and the first bit of measure nine, where the bridge begins again). Right off the bat in part one, Buckingham uses a rhythmic motif, playing a set of four sixteenth notes, the last of which is held for an additional few beats. He uses this motif in each measure of part one, except the fourth measure where he’s simply holding on to the note that ended the final motif for the entire four beats. Just where did these notes come from? We’ll get to that in a moment.

He starts out the second half of the solo, in measure four, almost identically. Measure four is, note for note, identical to measure one except the last note doesn’t spill into measure five as the last note of measure one is tied into the first half beat of measure two. So we start out measure five on the first beat instead of the second (as we do in measure two). It’s a subtle difference, but it’s definitive signal that we’re planning on not simply repeating ourselves.

And we certainly don’t! While the notes of measure five are the same, Buckingham deliberately alters the rhythm and plays around with it in measure six before going into pretty much a whole measure of sixteenth notes (measure eight) which closes out the solo.

Having looked at the structure, let’s now look at the notes. As mentioned, the song is in the key of Eb. In case you don’t already know, here’s the Eb major scale in what’s known as “root-six” position, meaning that the root of the scale (Eb) is on the sixth (low E) string:

And here’s where the wrinkle comes in – Buckingham doesn’t use an Eb scale throughout the entire solo. If you read music (and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t! Take a look at the article Your Very Own Rosetta Stone and see how easy it is to get started!), you know enough to look for accidentals in the notation. Accidentals are changes to notes, making them different from the key signature. If you look at measure eight, you’ll see a symbol that looks kind of like a mutated pound sign (#) in front of the third note, which is an A. This indicates that you want to play A natural instead of Ab, which is in the key signature. Accidentals always override the key signature and last for the duration of a measure.

Scanning through the entire solo I can also see that not only is the only use of an accidental, but it’s also the only use any A note (natural or flat) in all eight measures. All the A’s are natural and they’re all in measure eight.

So what does this mean? For starters, it means I might want to rethink using an Eb scale and instead use the Eb Mixolydian scale:

Here I have all the notes I need for this solo. Seriously. All the little motifs and phrases, as well as the long sequence of sixteenth notes at the very end, are just notes take from this scale. They are grouped into short, pleasant sounding melodies that are very much in character with the overall tone of the song. There is no magic formula when it comes to this.

But why would Lindsay Buckingham choose to use this particular scale? Again, there are several possible answers and I can’t begin to tell you which, if any, shaped his thinking. But let me tell you what I might guess, simply based on the evidence at hand.

To me, it’s a matter of what’s called targeting. Even though the solo takes place in a song in the key of Eb, it ends squarely on a part of the song that has momentarily moved to the key of Bb. The first line of the bridge consists of these two measures:

And then it goes happily back to repeating the two measures in Eb that we’ve been playing the entire song. And if we go back and look at the chords in of the rest of the song, you can see that they can fit in either the key of Eb or Bb:

So playing the notes he does in the first six measures of the solo, Buckingham really doesn’t have to worry about which scale he’s in as either will do. It’s not until measure eight that he commits to the Bb scale (or Eb Mixolydian, if you will), and that is because he wants to land squarely on a note of the Bb chord when the bridge starts. And, by choosing D, which is the ever-and-all-important third, as his final note, I think he gives it as good an ending as possible.

And I also tend to think of this scale more as “Bb” than “Eb Mixolydian” because of the notes he chooses to draw out, the F in measures one, three (and, consequently, four) and five and the Bb in measure two (which ties over to measure three). Because every other chord of the progression is Bb, it’s easy to kind of sneak the tonal center of the song that way.

So let’s take a moment and look at the Bb scale, again in “root-six” position:

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but it doesn’t come close to the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteen frets, where all the notes of the solo seem to be. So what do we do?

This is where our last lesson, A La Modal, comes in. We learned that scales don’t have to start on a root. We can start them on any note (also called the degree) of the given scale. For instance, we can start our Bb scale with the D note (the third of the Bb scale) on the sixth string:

This is why people will tell you that knowing your scale is only a first step, that you should also learn the various places on the neck where you can play it. Some teachers will find a scale position for each note of the scale. So, again using the Bb major scale as an example, you should be able to play a Bb scale with Bb (example #2C), C, D (as here), Eb (example #2B), F, G and A as your starting notes on the sixth (low E) string.

Why? You’ll notice, in this last example, that I added two extra notes (Eb and F) to the top. We’ll be needing that high F for this solo and I wanted you to see that they are easily within reach of the Bb scale, but only when we use the Bb scale which starts with the D (or Eb, as we saw in example #2B) on the low E (sixth) string.

As I mention, we can use any note as our starting point. Let’s look at the Bb scale starting on the C note, which is the second degree of this scale:

The TAB notes in parentheses are optional places to play the same note. The A and D can be played on the twelfth fret of their repsective strings instead of on the seventh frets of the D and G strings. Which fingering you decide to use is truly a matter of choice, or of the size of your hand!

But what I want you to see is that, in both these last examples, we’re more into the area of the neck that Buckingham uses for his solo and we haven’t changed our scale at all, merely the scale’s position. In fact, for this solo I’m thinking on using these two positions of the Bb scale.

But how can I do that when the second measure has a note on the fifteenth fret? This is where bending comes into play. We’ll be devoting a whole column in the (relatively) near future on this, but for now you might want to brush up on the subject in the old column, Tricks of the Trade. You can use bends, particularly “full” bends, which raise the tone of the string one full step, to condense, or expand, your scale. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

I’ve taken a segment of the Bb scale, going from G to G (and the music notation (not the TAB) is back to being an octave lower for clarity) and written it out in TAB. This is the area where most of the solo is played. In the first example you can see that whichever fingering you use, you will have some big stretches to deal with. As a rule, you want to keep your solo played in a span that is comfortable for your fingers. A range of three to four frets is ideal. But we can’t get that here.

Unless we taking bending strings into account, as we do here:

In this scale, I’ve eliminated the use of the tenth, fourteen and fifteenth frets by using full bends at various points in the scale. This frees my fingers from having to make awkward stretches.

And bending also allows you to give your guitar more of a voice; it allows it to sing. This isn’t going to be the easiest thing to demonstrate but allow me to try by looking at the very first phrase of the solo:

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

Here I’m playing this four-note phrase in four different ways. First, I play it “straight,” that is I strike each note once. And if you’re wondering how I’m getting the tone I do, I’m taking a page out of Lindsay Buckingham’s book and I’m not using a pick! That’s right, I’m playing all these MP3s with my fingers! First I play the Bb (eleventh fret of the B string), then the C (thirteenth fret), then the D (tenth fret of the high E (sixth) string) and finally the F (thirteenth fret).

I also strike with my fingers four times during the second time I play this. But on the third note, the D, instead of fingering it on the tenth fret of the first string, I strike the C note (thirteenth fret of the B) a second time and bend that note up a whole step to get the D. Then I strike the F note.

The third time through I only strike the C note once. I start on the Bb, then pick the C, wait a brief moment and then bend it up to D before striking the final F.

And on the fourth time through this phrase, I only use my fingers twice to strike the strings. I play the Bb first, as I’ve done each time, but then I hammer-on to the C note at the thirteenth fret and then bend that to get the D note before ending with a strike of the F note.

Each of these ways has its own voice and charm. I particularly like the last one because it seems to me like someone singing in one breath, but by hanging on to the bend (which, bended, is the D note) you get a nice harmony between the D and F.

Which notes you decide to bend is totally up to you. Listening to the solo, I find more and more places to stick in a few, such as here during the second and third measures:

It’s important to play around. Find what notes, if any, you feel comfortable about bending. Find which fingers work best for you. In this example, I’ve indicated the fingers I use, but there are certainly other ways of doing it. The main thing with example #5, for me, is using my middle finger for the note on the eleventh fret. This shifts my fretting hand slightly down the neck (“down” meaning down in tone, away from the body of the guitar), which makes getting the note on the tenth fret a breeze.

I want to take the time to point out what goes on in measure seven of the solo:

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This bend is a little tricky in that you want to use your index finger to bend and hold the bend on the G string while playing the following notes on the B and high E (sixth) strings. This is a technique worth practicing, as you’ll find it used in all sorts of music, from metal to country, or “from Hank to Hendrix” as Neil Young might say. The reason that this is used a lot can be found in the “straight notes” TAB. If you look closely, you’ll see that the notes line up in the E-shape I described in Moving On Up. Using a bend to get the same shape creates wonderful overtones on the guitar. Most people will immediately think Little Wing when hearing them, but it’s a technique used across all genres and styles.

Speaking of most people, many folks may take a look at measure eight of this solo and then throw in the towel! They don’t realize that if they’ve gotten this far, all the hard stuff is already done. Whenever you’re confronted with a long series of notes, the best thing to do (and you know what I’m going to say!) is to take it apart and deal with each section slowly:

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Here’s a clue: practice the scales I gave you at the start! Here we’re simply using portions of examples #2D and #2E. Where I put the “(sl)” symbol is where I slide (using my index finger) from one scale to the next. When I practiced this when I learned it, I worked first on the part up to the slide until I had it smooth. Then I worked on the second part. Finally I put them both together. One thing I found out while working out the second part was that I often would default to what I wrote out in example #7A. Not only that, but I kind of like that a lot better than the “original!”

Okay, after (and only after) you’ve taken each section by the horns and gotten it to a point that you’re happy, then put it all together. Remember to take it slowly:

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And once you’re happy with the results of that (and don’t fret about mistakes – listen to how many I made!), then you can work up to speed:

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I hope you had fun with this lesson and that it whets your appetite for trying out a lead or two. We’ll take the time every other month or so to examine more leads as well as to create some of our own. I think it’ll be fun. Hopefully, you will, too!

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 Forums page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Concept : Arpeggiations Mixed With Single Line Phrases

If you play Example 1, you will notice we now play 3 voices :

1) Melody (single note lines),

2) Accompaniment (chord arpeggiation), and

3) Bass (the root on the first beat of each measure to provide a solid reference point)

Before combining these 3 functions it’s wise to experiment with different melodies accompanied by the bass note of each chord

Here we play the melody of Hendrix‘ Little Wing’s first two measures on different postions on the neck around the chord shapes with the bass notes on strings (6) and (5).. (Notice that I mix open and fretted strings).

It’s important to learn the melody of a tune in different positions because it can be used as a reference, a starting point to improvise and it will give you your solos a richer melodic quality.

Experiment by mixing open and fretted strings.

It’s also possible to play the melody an octave higher (Example 3A) or lower (Example 3 B).

Here we experiment with embellishments of the melody and scalar like passages. Keep in mind it’s our purpose to improvise around the melody. You can leave out or add notes.

Try to create differences into your playing activity. You don’t have to play a mass of notes all the time, incorporate fields of lesser activity.

Now we combine the three voices together on the first four measures of Little Wing. This is quite tricky at first, but the more you experiment the easier you will be able to invent great melodies at the spot in conjunction with an accompaniment and bass part.

Next time we will pay attention to the accompaniment part and put more movement into the bass part.

Also check out… Improvisation for the Fingerstyle Guitarist Part I

So it occurred to me that my original piece was oriented to more a advanced player and that it probably wasn’t worth spit to a lot of you who are more in need of a practical, step-by-step method rather than some theoretical overview. If you’re one of these people, hopefully, I can make amends here and get you to a place where the first article will be of use to you as well. So, here we go. A central concept that is generally lost on most guitar players is that soloing is actually composing.

Most guitar players have oriented themselves to think of a solo as an opportunity to demonstrate how fast they can play and/or drop in some licks that they think are impressive.

When you hear a great melody sung by a vocalist, are you impressed by how “fast” they sing? Of course not. How about when you hear a great sax solo, are you impressed by how fast the sax is played? Again, no way.

So why is it that guitar players think that by playing a lot of notes they are going to win some prize? And we make jokes about drummers being crazy. Let me take a stab at an explanation for this speed obsession thing.

When one is learning how to play the guitar, one passes through a stage where it is difficult to play things at quicker tempos. So one feels challenged by playing eighths or 16ths and when performed successfully, one feels a certain sense of satisfaction.

It is this sense of satisfaction gained during the learning stage that leads guitarists to think that by choosing notes of shorter duration (and thus playing a lot more notes) that the solo must be good. But this is an illusion and until one gets over this illusion, it is simply not possible to play a decent solo.

Another problem with a bias to play “fast” is that it seems to lead guitarists to play out of time with the track. If they are playing 16th notes but they are not at the top of their speed range and they can’t play 16th note triplets or 32nd notes at that tempo, then they play their 16ths faster than the track, which, of course, sounds ridiculous. Worse yet, before you know it, their rushing becomes habitual and then absolutely everything they play is fighting the rhythm track.

You may have read somewhere that it is a good idea to sing along with your solos in order to slow you down and give you a better appreciation for the melodic value of what you are playing. This technique has some value and works wonders for some people but it also has its limitations.

For one, nobody has a vocal range sufficient to accommodate the range of the guitar. Also, once one has fallen into a pattern of repeating the same riffs over and over, singing along with those same riffs isn’t going to make much difference.

Again, the central concept is that solos are compositions. In order to solo well, one needs to develop an ability to compose melodies. So how do you do that? Well, here is what I suggest.

Start by playing the melody of the song.

Now a guitar creates sound differently than a voice, so allow that to affect the melody and color it. For example, use hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and bends to give the melody a slightly different interpretation. Play the same notes as the vocalist is singing but let the guitar be a guitar. You will find that there are many songs where this is all you need to do and you will have a fine solo.

Finding those songs within your existing repertoire will not only improve your show, it will also help you to begin to approach all of your solos differently.

Playing riffs that you have copied from other guitar players is probably the second worst approach, the first being just running through scales as quickly as possible. It is not only that one needs to develop their own unique voice (and copying licks is not taking you in that direction). You also need to think in terms of composition and melody rather than technique and regurgitation.

If you go back through your repertoire of material and rework your solos by interpreting the vocal melody on the guitar, you are going to imprint into your subconscious mind a number of melodies. You are going to start to work in terms of simple musical phrases rather than meaningless barrages of notes. You are going to learn some things about how variation in note values, rhythms and spaces can create tension and interest. And, hopefully, you are going to begin to move away from a riff-oriented approach and become more composition-minded.

After you have learned all of the melodies in your repertoire, go back and see where you can deviate from that melody in just a section or two. In other words, let’s say that you are playing over a 12-bar progression. Maybe there is a measure or two during which you can play something with the same rhythm as the original melody but using different notes. Or maybe there is a measure or two where you can play the same notes but apply a slightly different rhythm. Or maybe there is a place where you have a different phrase altogether but it lands on the same resolving tone.

So now you have two categories of solos in your repertoire. One – solos where you are going to give a guitar interpretation of the vocal melody (using the unique elements of the guitar such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and bends) but still sticking with the vocal melody. And two, solos where you have kept most of the vocal melody intact but in a few places you have altered a phrase or two.

You will find that there are certain songs in your repertoire where one of these two approaches is perfect and you will never want to play anything else. Great!

From now on, play these songs in live performance just like this with no additional improvisation. They are perfect as they are so leave them alone. Don’t think of them as “throw-aways”. Play them with as much emotional intensity as you can muster even though you know exactly what is coming.

Next move on to those songs for which this approach does not seem to be a perfect fit. On these songs begin by learning the melody and adding certain embellishments or modifications. Then move on by using the same beginning and ending notes for the phrase but making up something different in between. This will help you to learn and internalize the concept of resolving on the right note and will give both you and your audience some basic outline of where you are going.

As you compose your phrases, try to interject as much variety as possible consistent with maintaining both the musicality and integrity of the idiom, i.e., don’t play licks that don’t fit either the mood or the style of the piece.

Here are some types of variation to try.

Use a range of note and rest values, e.g., whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighths, dotted-half’s, dotted-quarters and triplet-half’s, quarters and eighths. Whole rests, half rests, quarter rests, eighth rests, use them all. Use staccato and legato devices. Until it becomes natural, make a mental note to work in as many value variations as possible. It is amazing how many amateur solos consist of only one note value (using eighths or 16ths or eighth-note triplets) – and no rests – throughout the entire solo.

Play, at various times during your solo, on both the middle, lower and upper registers of the guitar. Don’t just riff on that one part of the guitar where you feel most comfortable. The same note played on a different string will give you a completely different tone and texture. Be aware of this element and use it to select the best place to phrase both your chords and passages and to create additional variety and interest in your solo. And use the different registers of the guitar to add variation to your solo and to give you different ideas.

Even if you have not mastered every possible scale and mode, you can still add significant variation using just a few basic concepts. For example, you can begin with your major pentatonic scale (root, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th) and then expand to a major scale by working in the 4th and 7th. Or you can begin with your minor pentatonic scale (root, minor 3rd, 4th, 5th and flat 7th) and then expand into a basic blues scale by adding a flat 5th or an altered blues scale by adding both the flat 5th and a natural 7th. Or you could add a 2nd and a lowered 6th to your minor pentatonic scale and thus transition into a natural minor scale.

Depending on the piece, use both your major scale (root, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th) and your blues scale (root, b3rd, 4th, b5th, 5th and b7th) during your solo. And play these in different positions on the neck. When you go to the IV or V chord in your progression, change scales and then come back to your original scale when you come back over the one. This works going from major to blues or blues to major, either way, as long as you are in a major key.

In your blues mode, do not limit yourself to just the minor pentatonic notes (root, b3rd, 4th, 5th and b7th). Let the pentatonic notes do the heavy lifting but color your phrases with a few well-chosen b5s (traditional blues scale) and natural 7ths (altered blues scale) nonetheless.

When selecting notes for string bends, be aware of the “blue notes”, i.e., the b3rd (traditional) as well as the b5th and b7th. These are great notes to bend up to from a half step below because the quarter-tone in between will still sound good (and quite bluesy).

Also keep in mind that soloing using just the notes of one scale over your entire chord progression is only one approach. You might call this a generalized harmony or “horizontal” approach. The “vertical” approach would be to select your notes (or your scale or mode) from the chord you are playing over.

Keyboard players seem to have a pretty easy time with this concept but guitar players often struggle. Having all your sharps and flats all singled out on the black keys does make certain things easier to visualize on the keyboard but it’s really not all that difficult to apply this concept to the guitar.

A good way to start would be to add a section, somewhere in your solo, where you would play a triad on your E, B and G strings using your open D or E (or Dm or Em) finger positions and moving them around to create the appropriate chord. You can use your right hand to play various patterns or arpeggios or select individual notes from the triads that you are playing with your left hand (assuming you are right-handed). After a few bars of this concept you can go right back into your basic scale. Just a little bit of this will add a huge amount of variety and interest to your solo.

So now you have three types of solos in your repertoire. One where you play a guitar interpretation of the melody, one where you add embellishments or modifications to the melody and a third where you begin and end on the first and last notes of the melody but apply your own phrases in between.

A fourth type of solo could also be created by incorporating a combination of these three approaches into one solo. For instance, if you have a 16-bar solo, you can begin with the melody of the verse for the first eight (approach #1) and then go into an altered melody for the next eight (approach #3). And, of course, playing a completely new and different melody will give you a fifth type of solo with the added benefit that, after you have mastered the first four approaches, your note selection and melody composition in this mode is sure to have improved.

Once you have mapped out your night’s solos in this fashion you will be able to see which strategy works best for each tune. Then, on those tunes where you still feel compelled to go further away from the original melody, make up your own beginning and ending notes and compose completely new phrases.

If you have not shorted yourself by skipping over the first three solo concepts, you are bound to come up with much better ideas now that you have reoriented yourself to think in terms of melody and not technique and to apply the more esoteric concepts that you read about in “On Soloing”.

Don’t give up your first two solo concepts. There are songs where it is simply perfect to play just the melody or an embellished melody. And there are many songs where you want to begin and end at the same point as the melody. When you do get to that third, fourth and fifth approach, your ideas will not only sound fresh to the audience (since they haven’t been listening to the same riffs all night) they will actually be more creative because your imagination will be working along more musical lines.

One final idea: When you play with other guitar players or with other guitar players listening, you will have a tendency to fall back into the bad habit of riffing as fast as you can.

If just their presence doesn’t cause you to do this, as soon as you hear someone else play a bunch of notes, you are going to want to play at least that many. But don’t. Instead have the self-confidence to let the other guy win the “who’s faster” contest. If you don’t have the self-confidence to do it, then, trust me and do exactly as I tell you just this one time.

If you are following another guitar solo, always play fewer notes. In fact, the fewer you play, the better. Concentrate on playing a great melody.

While the other guy is focused on winning the “who’s faster” contest, you will be focused on winning the “who’s more musical” contest. And unless he figures out what is happening and gives up his fixation with speed, he will have no chance to win the latter.

If the guy in front of you has just rattled off a mindless succession of same note value scales and you follow that with just the melody of the tune, you will get a better response from the audience every time.

On the next tune, “your opponent” will play even more notes (and probably rush the tempo if he wasn’t already). Just come back and play the melody or a slight embellishment of the melody. Again, you will get the better audience response and the other guy will get even more frustrated and play even more pointless noodling.

After you have used this technique to establish yourself as the more musical soloist, you may as well go back and win the who’s faster war as well – but not by playing more notes (or by actually playing faster). If you’re both playing eighth note triplets at a 120 BPM tempo (and you’re both playing in time), obviously, you’re both playing at the same speed. But if you save your little flurry of notes for the last bar or two of your solo (and work up to it by playing a nice little simple melody) the contrast will make it seem to the audience that you are playing much faster than you actually are.

I am not a proponent of the concept of music as a competition or of trying to outshine or upstage anyone you are playing with either live or in the studio. I just don’t see music that way.

In fact, I’m not really all that comfortable giving you the tools to frustrate your other guitar player friends at your local jam session but I do so in the hopes that you (and maybe even your victims) will gain something from the experience.

Until you get to a certain level, when you are around other guitar players, either at a jam session or on a gig or even maybe in your own band, you are going to be tempted to get into the “who can play faster” thing.

Since we have no music police in the free world, I’m trying to give you a technique to help you change your solo mindset, break some bad habits, teach yourself the power of eloquence and perhaps even rid the world of a few million superfluous guitar notes.

If you try the strategy of playing fewer notes, composing melodies rather than throwing off riffs and saving anything quick for the last bar or so, you are not only going to sound better, your audience (by way of their response) is going to give you (and everyone else on stage) a great lesson in the value of these techniques.

As a result, you will develop more confidence in them, apply them with greater consistency and, practically overnight, become a much more seasoned player.

Best of luck to you!

And if all else fails, you can always take up the drums.

While I cannot overstate the importance of learning your scales, arpeggios, and all things theory related, as a guitar teacher, my priority is to get students playing music as soon as possible. Knowing the geography of the guitar neck is imperative to successful playing. The prospect of learning even a couple of fingerings for any given scale can be a tad daunting and time consuming for both novices and some experienced players. I like to use the following approach to get budding improvisers into the musical element quickly, all the while helping to reinforce the learning and visualizations of scales and arpeggios.

Let’s use the key of C for the purpose of simplicity. Play the following common barre chord voicings. They are all 7th chord voicings with the root note on the A string and the fifth on the low E string: Cmaj7, Dm7, Em7, Fmaj7, G7, Am7, and Bm7b5. (The 3rd inversion of the m7b5 is nearly impossible to play without discomfort, so just visualize the 5th on the E strings.) See Example 1.

These chords are all derived from the C major scale. If we use a fretboard diagram to draw in all of these chord shapes, what do we see? All of the notes of the C major scale from the third position to the thirteenth position. If we continue up into the next octave, we’ve covered the entire guitar neck with C major scale tones; don’t forget to cover the first position with the 3rd inversion Bm7b5 chord.

What we’re doing here is making available all of the notes of a major scale over the entire length of the fretboard by using chord shapes instead of scale patterns. This makes the process of learning the fretboard and making musical use of it much easier.

I recommend taking small steps. For example, take the Imaj7 and IIm7 and make up lines using only tones from those two positions. See Example 2.

Once you are comfortable visualizing the two chords, add the IIIm7 and so forth. You will be gradually increasing your comfort zone, chord by chord. See Example 3.

I use these particular chord voicings because of their ease and relative ubiquity in music, but any voicing spanning six strings will work provided you move them across the neck diatonically, keeping the intervallic construct consistent. For example, we can construct a chord using this intervallic design: 1 4 7 3 6 9 (from low E to high E)

These voicings are relatively uncommon and much more dense and rich than the previous ones, but they are diatonic to the key of C and can be used to serve the same purpose.

Once you’ve got this cold in the key of C, proceed to the eleven remaining major keys. In the future we’ll take a look at applying this process to the melodic and harmonic minor scales.

Any questions, comments or suggestions can be sent to myodice@excite.com. See ya.

Leads generally fall into one of the following categories: “rhythmic,” “melodic,” “slashing” and “effects.” They’re pretty self-explanatory. And they can overlap – you can have “rhythmic/melodic” or “melodic/effects” and so on. A rhythmic lead usually is a rhythm guitar part brought to the fore. The start of the solo in Proud Mary is a great example of this. The second half of that solo is a melodic lead.

The difference between a melodic and a slashing lead is can be best seen (okay, heard) in the two solos in the Pink Floyd classic, Comfortably Numb. The first solo, between the verses, is truly gorgeous (and the solo on Mother from the same album would fit this description as well). The “melody” carefully follows the chord changes. You really can “sing” it, if you wanted to. The lead at the end of Comfortably Numb is more harsh – full of jarring runs of blues and rock riffs strung together. It’s the sort of thing that makes you drop everything and grab your air guitar off its air guitar stand and play along. Slashing leads are more concerned with scales and flashy guitar “tricks” which could include anything from a simple bend to a complex series of tapping. A melodic solo will follow the path laid out by the chords of the song; the slashing solo will say, “Here’s my scale!” and stick to that, letting the chords of the song fall where they will.

An effects lead is precisely that, a solo built out of an effect or multiple effects. Usually, an effects lead is combined with a melodic or slashing lead but it can stand on its own. One of the inherent problems of an effects lead is that it relies solely on the electronics to accomplish its task This is why some bands sound so much different live on stage than they do on record. Innovations in effects are rapidly changing this, however.

For the beginner, the melodic lead is the best place to start. Way too often guitarists learn to solo simply by copying other solos. You learn various riffs and “tricks” and then string them together in the appropriate key. This is a tried and tested method and while it will get you off to a fast start, it will not make you a good soloist. It will make you a good imitator. If you start out with discovering and developing your own style, it is easier to adapt other guitarists’ styles to fit yours. I’m not saying don’t learn solos note for note (more on that later), just wait a little and give yourself a chance first. Become someone else later if you want to.

Another good thing about melodic leads is that, again due to the nature of the solo, they can be studied and learned on any guitar, whether electric, acoustic or classical. Never con yourself into thinking that “solo” automatically implies “electric guitar.” Any song arranger or soloist worth his or her salt will explore not only different types of instrumentation when constructing a lead, but also the ever-growing array of devices through which to play them.

A lesson on melodic solos, with a step by step guide to constructing a lead part, can be found in the article Leading Questions. Also don’t miss our series of lessons on creating solos, starting with Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1.

I guess Rob and I were sort of surprised at the audience response, especially on that first night. In between tunes, we gave each other a “wow, this going over big time” look. Then, Rob, only half jokingly, says, “Well, don’t get too full of yourself. With the groove that Nate and Jeff are laying down you could probably spit on your guitar and get an ovation!”

An exaggeration? Of course. But he did make a very important point.

As a soloist in a blues or R&B format, the best you can hope to do is rise to the level of the rhythm track. You might think you’re wailing away. But, if you don’t have a solid groove underneath, it really isn’t going anywhere.

So, if you are looking for the secret to great soloing, perhaps the most important rule is to be very selective about whom you play with. What should you look for in a bass player and drummer? Well, that’s a whole other column isn’t it? For now, let’s just establish the basic rules and leave it at that.

Before you get up to solo in the first place, ask yourself these two questions: One, do I play in time or do I tend to take liberties with the tempo? And two, do I have a good sound?

If your time is not solid, you are going to sound sloppy. No matter how creative your ideas, if they are not executed in time, you are still going to sound more or less like an amateur. If you learned to play by picking up a guitar and trying to play everything you know as fast as you can, you may have developed some bad habits. If so, you are going to need to work you way out of them and quick. Start practicing with a metronome and keep it up until your internal clock gets in sync with real time.

Like most guitar players, you probably started adding distortion to your guitar both because you liked the sound of it and also because it seemed to make your axe easier to play. Yes, a little sustain does seem to smooth out the rough edges of the attacks but you don’t want to be hiding bad meter behind lots of overdrive.

Unless you have heard yourself on several recordings and know for sure that you have a great sound, try working with less distortion. And when you are comfortable with that, a little less again. We generally need a lot less overdrive than we think. Don’t feel like you have to fill up every space. Your guitar is not a saxophone. It’s O.K. for the notes to ring for a while and then fade out.

If it is necessary to sustain a note out for longer than what your amp/pick-up configuration is giving you, add a little finger vibrato and move your pickups toward your speaker to induce a little feedback. A little experimentation with this technique will allow you to add that screaming element at relatively low sound pressure levels and with a good strong attack on the front of the note.

Maybe, you don’t use any overdrive at all. That’s O.K. Just realize that there are licks that work in both clean and dirty mode and there are licks that work only in one mode or the other. My solution is to use both. I have a customized Mesa Boogie with a clean lead channel and an overdriven lead channel. I use the same graphic EQ, reverb and delay for both sounds. This keeps a level of continuity. But there are times when I’ll use a judicious amount of distortion and times when I won’t.

Whatever sound you go for, make it your own. Forget about trying to sound “just like Stevie Ray Vaughn” or “just like Jimi Hendrix”. Get a pleasant, well-defined tonal center that works well with your repertoire (of both licks and material) and stick with it. Keep the effects to a minimum. How is your audience going to relate your sound to you if “your sound” consists of an endless procession of gimmicks? And if you haven’t got a sound, what have you got?

So, assuming that you have both your meter and your sound together (and, hopefully, are playing with a tight rhythm section), here is our first rule: “Listen”.

Why? Two reasons: First, to capture the vibe. Second, for inspiration. Usually, if you can find one, the other will channel in as well. Instead of comping up to your solo thinking about what wild licks you are going to throw off, just listen to what the rest of the band is doing. Whether you are following a vocal, a rhythm vamp or another solo, tune into the vibe and listen to the ideas that are coming from the other players. When, it comes time to start your solo, maintain that vibe and begin just by playing what you feel (within, of course, the confines of keeping the rest of the rules in tact along the way).

Rule number two is: “Start Simple”.

Good solos are like good stories. They need a beginning, a middle and an end. Sometimes, you may even add a dénouement. But the idea is to draw the listener in and take them somewhere. You have to start simple for two reasons. One, you need to catch the ear of the listener. Give them something easy to process at first. Second, you need to have somewhere to go. If you start making love with an orgasm, it may feel good for a few seconds but then what are you going to do?

O.K. You’re four bars or so into your first pass. You started with a nice simple little melody that incorporated some of the structures of the preceding Hammond organ solo. Everybody in the room heard it and it made sense to them. Basically, you have them tuned into the guitar. Now, what do you do?

Rule number three: “Develop with style (yours)”.

Well, we all knew that was coming. But, how do I do that?

Here are a couple of different primary strategies for developing your solo. One way is motif-to-motif. A motif is sort of a basic musical idea, a short melody or rhythmic device. The motif-to-motif strategy involves the statement of one idea followed by another version of the idea that either resolves or extends the first idea. Establishing a phrase and then moving on using different notes but maintaining the same phrasing is probably the most basic example.

The reason this strategy works is that it gives your audience something to pick up on followed by something related to it. Remember, the more listeners you take with you, the more successful you are going to be. So make it easy on them. Give them something logical to follow.

Another strategy is to begin with a simple version of the melody, add a few embellishments and work your way towards increasing complexity. Rob Mullins is the master of a rather peculiar version of this strategy. Rob takes the melody and adds his embellishments going increasing outside until he winds up with a flurry of essentially random tones. He does this so gradually that, at the climax, you are sure he is playing some exotic scale. But, he’s not. He is, in these moments, using the piano as an atonal percussion instrument, but he has taken you there so skillfully that you want to believe he has just invented some whole new set of harmonic rules.

Remember that complexity doesn’t have to mean outside. That’s just one parameter. You can also add complexity with more notes, longer phrases or different rhythms… or all of the above. And, of course, you can combine the motif-to-motif approach with the melody embellishment approach.

Hopefully, you will find a combination of these techniques that works well with your repertoire of licks. If, and when, you do, trust it and go with it. That is how you start to develop your own style. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your stuff isn’t good enough. You don’t have to play as fast as Al Dimeola or as outside as Alan Holdsworth to be a great guitarist. Django Reinhardt only had two fingers on his left hand yet he was one of the most influential guitarists of all time. Your own uniqueness is the your most potent weapon. If you can incorporate the way that you naturally hear things together with a subconscious adherence to these rules, and play with good meter and good tone (and a great rhythm section), it will work.

And now for rule number four: “If they liked it once, they’ll love it twice”.

As you build to your climax, have this old Vaudevillian adage implanted somewhere in your subconscious. It is the reason that repetition works so well. Give it to them. Repetition creates tension. You want to hear it again but you also want to hear it resolve. When you hit on an intense little theme, repeat it and resolve it only at some logical dropping off point such as the end of a four-bar phrase. If they liked it once, they will love it twice, or even three or four times.

Rule number five (again from the classic rules of show business): “Always leave them wanting more”.

This is the rule that brings balance to rule number four. You can wear your audience out. This is especially true when the audience is required to process a lot of musical information in a small amount of time. Yes, sensory overload can be very effective but works best in small doses.

As to the overall length of your solo, remember the Charlie Parker rule (our rule number six): “Anything more than four passes and you are just practicing”.

Yes, he really said that and you ain’t gonna play any better than Bird, so don’t fight it. Forget about having everybody solo until they run out of ideas. If you absolutely have to do that, save it for rehearsal. Don’t subject your audience to it. Approach your live gigs as performances not practices. Try to pack as much excitement as possible into your show. Before you take the stage, know who is going to solo when and for how long. It’s O.K. to have a few open-ended vamp sections leading into a set-length chorus or bridge for resolution. Just don’t try to put on a clinic with every solo. Your audience will appreciate your eloquence.

Actually, I like to keep it down to two passes. I got used to this structure when playing with Melvin “Deacon” Jones, who has recorded three great solo CDs and served as the musical director for Curtis Mayfield, Freddie King and (for 18 years) John Lee Hooker. With a two-pass formula, you can have two different instruments solo back-to-back (such as organ followed by guitar), bring the vocals back in and still get out of the tune in compliance with rule number five, i.e., before the room is ready for another song.

Although rules four and five (and, to an extent, even six) may appear to the novice as in conflict, they really are not. You can use repetition in a simple phrase or a blinding flurry of notes and everything in between. You can wait until your blinding flurry to introduce repetition or you can begin with a simpler version and end with the blinding flurry. Just program all three principles into your belief system and let your creative forces take over from there.

Which leads us to rule number seven: “Don’t think”.

Don’t think?! How am I supposed to follow all these rules and not think? Either I’m using the rules or I’m not. Right? Right! Use the rules… but don’t think about them.

Or, more to the point, don’t think about them while you are soloing. Think about them now. Think about them when you practice. Think about them when you are listening to other solos, both live and recorded. Use this period to internalize the rules. Decide for yourself that they are, in fact, the rules… that they do, in fact, work. That, with these rules, you can trust your stuff and it will work.

This will allow these concepts to penetrate into your subconscious such that you won’t have to think about them when you do go to solo. They will just be there. Just like your open G chord is there when you want it. Then, use them… but don’t think about them. Stay focused on feeling the vibe and listening to the other players. Trust your stuff and let it happen.

Also check out… More on Soloing

Dial it in

Picture this: Johnny the guitar guy is on a gig where the music is completely improvised and the leader has just looked at him to start a piece. Johnny starts to panic because he remembers the last time this happened he starting playing a funk ‘riff’ which caused a ‘jam’ to happen and The Leader sent him home. The Leader wants a thematic statement that amounts to more than riffing. How can we help Johnny? Tell him to think of a friend’s or business’s phone number and apply it to the tonal pool that he is in; from there he has a place to work from. What does this mean? Let’s have a look:

Let’s say that the number that Johnny came up with was 404-827-3470 and the tonal pool was in C major (CDEFGABC). The way this group of numbers maps to the scale (pool) is direct: The root, C, is 1, D is 2, etc. How do we handle zero? I treat it as a wild card, so it can be anything, which can add a bit of ’spice’ to your thematic material. For now I am treating it as the minor third. You can treat it as the 9th, b9, #11, etc. So how would a melody look/sound that is derived from this? First, let’s look at it as straight 8ths over a C major triad (C-E-G):

It has a pretty interesting sound against a C major triad, but let’s look at the harmony that this new melody implies by stacking each group upon itself and maybe a few inversions:

So now we have a couple of interesting sounds but have not made music out of them yet. This is where we need to inject some rhythm to move closer to the goal of making music with it. In live playing this would be dictated by the current context (we will get into the idea of rhythmic improvisation in a future article), but since we are just theorizing let’s start with another device based on the phone number. Now we will relate the number of sixteenths in each note to the pitch of the note:

For our wild card (0), I chose a duration of one 16th note and then four 16th notes, respectively.

The result is this: we’ve mapped both the pitches and the rhythmic value to the numeric sequence. We used 16th notes in the rhythmic mapping; try mapping with 8ths, quarters, etc.

Another way to quickly generate new material is to use the numeric values from the individual note durations to generate a new set of numbers. For instance, let’s say we have a melody in bars four and five that has this rhythm:

If we are using 16th notes as the basis for our count we would come up with the following set of numbers from the above rhythm: 442 211 222 4 0 1 1 2 0, which would translate into this:

Remember, we are showing it in 8th notes but you should make it musical by mixing up both the order of the notes and the rhythm. We can hear that this example is very common sounding, almost parochial. Let’s break it up a little and see how it sounds:

Try to come up with permutations of your own. If you get stuck, email me and I will send you some of mine. Don’t feel bound by these suggestions. If you hear that the group of notes would sound better by changing it or adding a note, then do it. The generated note group is only meant to give you something to jump from, not constrain you.

Try using some of these devices to get you through rough areas in composing and improvising. Not all of them will sound good, but enough will that it will be worth the time. At the very least it will often lead to a new idea, if not an entire masterpiece. Think of how many people are in your local phone book and all of the musical ideas that this could initiate!

Keeping the basic principle in mind that we discussed here, try applying it to formulas from your calculus class or license plates from your car or neighbors car. It will be left up to you to figure out how to map the less obvious correlations between odd characters and the music. For instance; not all of the characters from a tag of LZM 4A2 would readily map out. This is where you have to be creative!

In our next article we will discuss how to break apart common licks and find a new truth in them as well as other devices to aid in finding new note combinations. In future articles we will look further into the delicate art of developing a theme over the span of multiple bars.

Also check out… Thematic Improvisation Part 1

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

Some of this material we have covered before in our various discussions on theory. For the sake of getting right to the heart of the matter, let’s agree on the definition of a few “givens” right here and now.

1) As far as we are concerned, we have twelve notes with which to work. They are all a half step from each other and are as follows:

2) A scale is defined as a sequence of notes used from a specific note to the next occurrence of that same note. This sequence is a specific pattern, usually a combination of whole-steps and half-steps. The pattern tells us what type of scale it is.

For instance, look at the twelve notes we have just listed. The next note in the sequence would be A once again. Each note is a half step from the next. So this is indeed a scale. It is called the chromatic scale. You will notice that this scale has twelve notes in it, which is unlike the major and minor scales we already know. It’s important to get out of the habit of thinking that a scale will have a certain number of notes. .

Let’s take another example. Suppose we had a scale where the notes were A, B, C#, D#, F, G and then A again. There are six notes in this scale and each one is a whole step from the other. This is called a whole tone scale. Since A is the root, or starting point, it is an A Whole Tone scale. Later in this article we’ll be examining the pentatonic scale, which, as you might guess, has five different notes. So please try not to get hung up on the number of notes in a scale, okay?

3) A major scale is defined by the following sequence:

I cannot tell you how important it is to know this. When we write out other scales, as we will shortly with the pentatonic, we do so in terms of the major scale. Knowing your major scale well can make learning all the other types of scales much easier.

Be sure you have this down pat before we move on. Read the first part of Theory Without Tears and test yourself by writing out different major scales. Definitely know C, G, D, A and E because you will find that the majority of guitar songs are in these keys.

4) The relative minor of any major key is the sixth note in that key’s major scale. So, for instance, we know that the C major scale is:

Since A occupies the VI position, we know that A minor is the relative minor of C major. Type “relative minor” into the search engine on the home page if you want to find a wealth of information to read to learn more about this.

4(a)) A natural minor scale is defined by the following sequence:

4(b)) The notes in the relative minor’s (natural) scale are the same notes as its relative major scale. This is a mouthful and I’m not really sure there’s an easy way to say it. This is what I’m talking about. Going back to our C major scale:

It has neither sharps nor flats. The A natural minor scale, since A is the relative minor of C major, will not have any sharps or flats, either:

And, if you’re interested in such things, the relative minor scale is called the Aeolian mode. So pat yourself on the back, you’ve picked up a bit of modal theory!

5) Each fret on a guitar denotes a half step in tone. Two frets would therefore be one whole step.

6) Any chord, major, minor, whatever, is built from the I, III and V of its major scale. The IIIs and Vs can be raised (indicated with a sharp (#) sign) or lowered (indicated with a flat (b) sign) a half step, but they would still be discussed in terms of changes from the MAJOR key. (Read The Power of Three.)

The First Major Breakthrough

A lot of people freak out about scales because they think that there are so many of them to learn. Well, they are right. Thinking logically about what we already know, there have to be twelve major scales. Since we know that there are three different minor scales, then it’s easy to figure out that there are thirty-six of those. Almost fifty scales in just two categories! I’d be scared!

But in panicking over scales, we forget about the guitar itself. It is designed the way it is for a reason – to make your life simpler. Last time we saw how we could take one chord shape and turn it into a whole new chord by placing it somewhere else on the fretboard. We do the same thing with scales.

The key to learning scales is to give yourself a reference point from whence to start. Traditionally this point is the root of a scale. And for now, this is a good place for us to start. But don’t get too comfortable here. To develop skills in soloing and improvisation, you will want to know how to practice scales starting from each note of the scale. We’ll be looking at ways of doing this two articles from now.

We know that the G major scale is G, A, B, C, D, E, F#, G. If we were to map this out on our fretboard, it would look like this:

You see here that if we put our root (G, in this case) on the low E string, we can climb two full octaves in first position. We can, in fact, do this all over the neck of the guitar. But first we have to eliminate our use of open strings. This is very easily done:

The trick here is to position your fingers in such a way that you have the best movement over the notes. Since this all fits in a range of four frets, I dedicate one finger for use in each of the frets. The middle finger covers the root and the other notes (C, D and the last G) that fall in the third fret. My index finger gets the second fret, where the B, E, A and F# are played. The first F# and the B that occupy the fourth fret are played by my ring finger and my pinky gets the A, D, G , C and E notes on the fifth fret.

This is what is known as a scale pattern. Usually you will see them written in books like this:

However, for our purposes, we want to convert this from a specific scale, G major, so that it will work for any major scale. Provided that your guitar is standard-tuned (or at least tuned in standard intervals, like all the strings lowered a half step or something) and that your root note is on the sixth string, this will work. What we are going to do is replace the specific notes of the G major scale with their Roman numeral counterparts (and “R” for “root” or “I”):

Believe it or not, you can now play every major scale on your guitar. All you need to do is find the root note on the sixth string and follow the pattern. How about a Bb scale? Well, even if you don’t know the notes involved, you can still do it as long as you know that Bb is the note on the sixth fret of your low E string:

At this point, some of you may already be ahead of the game. Knowing one scale pattern that covers four frets, even though it has sixteen notes, certainly doesn’t begin to cover the range of your guitar! And songs don’t necessarily stay all nice and polite in the same key. We’re going to get to all that (promise), but today I want to take a brief sidestep.

Whittling Things Down To Size

If you think that the major scale is a lot to deal with, you are right. Most blues and rock (modern, classic, metal, neo-metal, punk, alternative, progressive and whatever category you’d care to come up with in order to set your music apart from everyone else’s in order to have it be marketed and mass produced for a targeted audience. Lord, doesn’t anyone just play music anymore?) guitarists live and die by the pentatonic scale. Why? For starters, it has five different notes instead of the seven of the major and minor scales. (Much) More importantly, it is very guitar friendly.

Remember our list of “givens?” Here’s another:

7) The major pentatonic scale for any key is defined as follows (all notes derived from the major scale):

So if we go back to our G major scale and take out the notes we want, we see this is our G pentatonic scale:

I call the major pentatonic the “My Girl scale” because if you play it with the correct rhythm, it is the opening riff to the old Temptations song. Paul McCartney uses it a lot as a bass line – a really good Beatles song to hear this bass line is Your Bird Can Sing.

But wait! Things get even easier! I don’t know about you, but having to continually span four frets (here the second to the fifth) is a bit of a pain. The most comfortable thing for a guitarist to play is the interval of a whole step (two frets). We can accomplish this by being sneaky and “shifting” the scale along the fretboard. Start with playing the G with your index finger and then the A note (fifth fret) with the ring finger. Now, instead of jumping strings between the A and B, slide your ring finger up the two frets to get the B note and look where the rest of the notes in the scale now fall:

You see, we were doing great until we reached the G string and then had to go back to the fourth fret to find the B note. So, let’s employ yet another shift, sliding once again from the A to the B note on the D string (again, using the ring finger), like this:

Now look at how much of the neck we’ve covered! And we haven’t once moved beyond the range of two frets!

And Wait!!! There’s More!!!

No lie, it gets even easier. Besides knowing how the major scale is formed, knowing your relative minors will improve your playing in a hurry. Why? Let’s look and see.

We have already established that the G major pentatonic scale is G, A, B, D, E and then G again. Since we know that E is the VI position of the G major scale, we also know that Em is the relative minor of G major. Remember our definition of scale:

A scale is defined as a sequence of notes used from a specific note to the next occurrence of that same note.

If we look at our G major scale and E (natural) minor scale, we can see that they are composed of the same notes:

The only difference is which note we have chosen to start on. And because we start with a different root, the pattern of the scale is different. The major scale is root, whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. But when you start with the E as a root, the pattern becomes root, whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole. This is the big mystery behind modal scales, one that we will examine in depth in the near future. For the sake of simplicity, we usually break down even the minor scales in terms of the major scale, like so:

The “b” indicates “flat” meaning that we have lowered the normal position of the major scale by a half a step. If you compare the E major scale to the E (natural) minor, you will see that we have indeed done this:

So, let’s add another given to the list:

8) The minor pentatonic scale for any key is defined as follows (all notes derived from the major scale):

Okay, here’s the payoff: The minor pentatonic, in its root form (having the root note on the sixth string as its starting point), is the easiest guitar scale in creation. It is both simple to play and to memorize:

Now I want to drive this point home to you. Look at the minor pentatonic scale chart we just did. Now look at this chart of the same relative major pentatonic:

Can you see that it’s the exact same pattern as far as where on the fretboard you can find the notes? The notes are, in fact, the same. What has changed is which position (or degree) the note occupies. To me, this is why learning scales can throw a lot of people off. You could learn one pattern and never see how it interacts with another, or how it relates to chord shapes, which is what we will be discussing two lessons from now.

But, for the time being, what does this all mean to you? Put as simply as possible, this means that as long as you can find your root note on either the first or sixth string, (and they are both on the same fret unless your guitar is tuned differently than standard), you have this incredibly easy scale available to you in both major and minor pentatonic. Let’s look at a few examples:

If you’re a beginner, you’ll be dumbfounded at how may song riffs and solos are taken from the pentatonic scale. Here are a couple of riffs and a lead, which I think you’ll recognize:

I hope you are starting to realize that the guitar is not the unfathomable mystery you might have once imagined. You simply need to take the time to learn about it and about music and to think things through in a logical manner. Speaking of which, Paul has managed to get an interview with Bill Edwards, the man who wrote and publishes the Fretboard Logic series. Once you start seeing how patterns work, you’ll be amazed at how quickly your fingers take to them. And that can be both good and bad.

We have been fortunate to find a number of talented guitarists and writers to contribute pieces on soloing and improvising. I highly advise you to read all of their material. With this little bit of basic knowledge I’ve given you, it won’t seem as hard as you might initially think.

In the next column we’re going to take a detour into something more stylistic in nature: string bending. It will give us a nice break from moveable chords and scales before we come back and tie a lot of these threads together. Seeing how the chord shapes and scales (and bends) all fit in together will help you make even more sense of all of this.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or topics you’d like to see discussed in future columns. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next lesson…

Peace

In order to do have this sort of connection to the music when playing, a release of musical agenda when ‘performing’ must happen. Having an agenda, musically, can range from trying to ‘work in’ things from our practice sessions to trying to play in the style of a particular player. Both of these approaches can produce good-sounding, cohesive music, but they both tip the balance of our participation in the music from active to preemptive. That is, we impose things (lines, voicings, etc) on the music that may not have anything to do with the piece other than the fact that it ‘fit’. Again, even if it sounds good, is it really true to the moment?

What exactly is the “moment”?

The ‘moment’ is the lump in your throat and the feeling of sliding down the front of a 12 ft. wave! It’s hearing the drummer displace a snare hit and being able to react to it within an eighth note. It’s picking up on interplay between the saxophone and bass player and wrapping them in the perfect stack of notes, drawn from the pool of melodies improvised up to that point in the piece. The ‘moment’ is the exact space that you situate your musical self amongst the other sounds.

To be in the moment while playing/improvising music means that we will be causing, and reacting to, events within the music.

The last paragraph makes the ‘moment’ almost sound like a scary place to be! It is actually the safest and easiest place to be. We don’t have to worry about remembering things that we have practiced because we have no need to use them. This, in turn, means that we don’t have to add more to our list of ‘things that must be played correctly’ throughout the course of a performance and frees our mind. All we have to do is listen and be aware of where the piece evolved from (melody, rhythm, stylistic context, etc), the music will give us all of the material we need for our improvisation. Open up and play.

What is thematic improvisation?

When referring to ’soloing’, thematic improvisation is a mindset that dictates that each note we play is based on, the result of, and ultimately indebted to the one we played previous. This mandate eliminates the room for ‘licks’ and lines that we may feel inclined to play. Our playing becomes based on musical ideas that we pull from the ‘head,’ which is a jazz term for the written opening statement or the initial thematic statement of a piece.

The purpose of practice is to ensure that we are able to ‘get around’ on our instrument in order to bring forth our ideas.

A musical idea is anything that happens through the course of a piece whether it be an accidental string fart or a six beat phrase (I have found that actually thinking of the word “idea” will spawn a new theme in my mind). The action starts a cycle within the group that will eventually need to resolve. In order for it to resolve, we must pay attention to how the other members of the group react/reply to it (to whatever lesser or greater degree this happens) and co-develop until the idea is concluded or evolves into something else.

The development of an improvisation should be as a pot of cold water coming to a boil and then cooling. Be aware from the first bubble to the last one.

What do I need to know in order to do this?

At this point it must sound like we have to unlearn everything we already know in order to ‘empty’ ourselves. This isn’t so, we will be drawing (initially) from the ‘basics’, which everything else is derived from, but our exercises and discussions will be applicable to anything we may already have under our fingers. We will work towards liberating the music from the confines of licks, lines, and formulae.

Looking into what it takes to become a thematic improviser we will see that, from an academic standpoint, as we practice we will split our ideas up into halves, thirds… etc. We will displace the melodic and rhythmic motifs against a pulse provided by a metronome, drum machine, or some other reliable time keeping source. It is through this that our mind will first start to become aware of what it takes to expand a theme.

And where will we get our ideas to with which to practice? Among others places, through the aforementioned transcription process, experimentation with material we already know, and any further study of the theoretical end of music. We will also introduce different mechanisms that can used to give us a thematic “jump-start” in future articles.

A quick thought on Transcription

One of the central ideas to the mindset of learning to improvise (especially for students of jazz) is that of transcription. Transcription in and of itself is a great thing. It can strengthen our musical minds by helping us to pay attention to the details of what the soloist is playing, the note-to-note evolution, and how it is affecting the accompanying musicians. If that is as far as we take the process, we would have all we need. Without learning the ’solo’ on our instruments we can get what we need from it. What do we need from it? During the transcription process we should observe the following:

• Key center(s)/textures – where the soloist situates his or her melodies in relation to the reigning tonic and how the surrounding harmony expands and contracts to accommodate.
• Interaction amongst the band members – are they passing musical clues around the circle?
• Your own personal impression of mood that the notes and phrases played by the soloist helps to create (it’s these moods that we will strive to find during our own practice sessions, not by playing things we have transcribed, but through searching for combinations of notes and rhythms that make us feel that way on our own – this is what people mean when they say things like “John Coltrane was always searching for something”, etc)
• Close attention should be given to the rhythmic relationships between the voices – ie. Are saxophone and guitar playing off of each other in a way that comes together to create one phrase (each playing separate partials of the beat)? Etc…

My experience with thematic improvisation

Early on in my life as a musician I sought liberation from position playing, patterns, ‘chords’ and such. The way that I choose to handle this was in the way that I shed (practiced) and what I worked on. My first thought towards this goal was around the age of 17. I believed that improvisation was, in essence, spontaneous composition. What I had not yet realized was that when playing in a certain context (such as the framework of a ‘tune’) the ’solo’ first needed to make musical sense unto itself (i.e. no ‘licks’ or formulaic playing). And it also needed to be a literal exposition on the head or main theme, as it were (it took me another few years for this one to hit).

Anyway, as a means to this end, I started approaching my practice sessions as a time to learn to make strong musical sense with very few notes (this is by no means the only thing I worked on – there was the composing, reading, etc). The only way to do this is to undertake the task of mastering time and rhythm. Anything that is played with good time and self-assured rhythmic intent will work anywhere. Add a real sense of melody and you have a true voice.

I would start by first choosing a rhythmic backdrop (always!). This often took the form of a metronome (or drum machine) or a piece of recorded music. The next thing I would do is choose 3 random notes. These would be literal notes, not a graphical point on the guitar. In other words I would think to myself “Eb, D, and B”, as opposed to “4th string 1st fret, etc…” This way I had to use all of those notes from everywhere on the fingerboard! And, I had to make the playing of them sit well in the groove and give the playing momentum. So I was making music with every pitched inch of my instrument (well, at this point, the part with strings at least).

When playing with the recorded music (often times Shostakovich or Bartok string quartets, various fusion albums) the goal was to interact with the music as though I were a part of it. I am not talking about ‘fantasy jamming’, I mean that I would try to be an additional voice within the music (not *soloing*). This was difficult depending on a few things such as: did the random notes I chose work with the music well? If not, I would spend a lot of time trying to play in between the ‘inside’ notes on the recording so the movement between notes would make some sense. Etc… As time went on I started choosing 4 notes, 5 notes… By the time I was using all twelve I had discovered the concept of tone rows and went on that tangent for a while trying to make them groove beautiful…

When I worked with the metronome I would work on the same thing, but an odd thing started to happen. I noticed that I became sort of ‘rain man-ish’ using the metronome. I would come out of my practice trance and find myself obsessively regrouping the beats in bars of four by eights (5+3, 2+2+1+2+1, etc) and sixteenths (this became really bad, after a while. I was doing it on a macro and micro level at the same time – partials, beats, bars, etc…), all the while maintaining a melodic/thematic/rhythmic mental mandate (needless to say, I had almost no social life as a kid – nor now).

This (among many other things) has left me with the ability to be free from the imposition of the instrument (for the most part) to give more respect to the music that I am participating in by allowing myself to be moved by it and play accordingly. Taking the head and playing an exposition…

Conclusion

In my future articles we will cover:

• Devices to generate thematic material for practice
• Exercises designed to break apart, and find the music in the licks, lines, and voicings we already know, having them reemerge almost unrecognizable, yet fresh.
• Approaches to group improvisation that will spur interaction, contrapuntal playing, and a cohesive, controlled development.

Between now and the next time, take a moment to do some focused listening and try to find examples of some of the things we have talked about (group interaction, rhythmic variation, lyrical, thematic playing, etc). A few of the recordings (there are many, many more) that revealed some of these properties to me are:

• Keith Jarrett Trio – Standards Live, Still Live, Tribute, Changeless, etc
• Ravi Shankar – Live at Monterey 1967 [LIVE], etc (the interaction between sitar and tabla is something else)
• Miles Davis -’65 era trio, We Want Miles, etc
• Ornette Coleman – Soap Suds, etc
• Joe Henderson – State of the Tenor

Have fun.

Also check out… Thematic Improvisation Part 2

During this series of columns on improvisation I will always start with a short practical example, analyse it and then give some examples of what we can do with this idea.

So let’s start with this one:

Concept : Arpeggiation with rhythmic diversity

Here the Right Hand fingers hold the chord form (the Em7) while the Left Hand fingers play a picking pattern. For now, since this is meant to be a simple exercise, the bass note (the open low E) is played on the first beat of each measure to have a marking point. As we get more skill and confidence we will add more bass movement.

The fingers of the Left Hand are, in essence, fooling around in the chord form, which leads to more independence and certainty (well, after some experimenting…) The finger indications (p (thumb),i (index), m (middle) and a (ring)) are only suggestions. You should feel free to execute them differently.

Advantage :

You are always sure the notes will fit into the harmony of the piece as the improvised melody is derived totally from the chord notes.

Some Chord Theory :

But after a while, only playing over Em7 chords would become quite boring. That’s why we will use Chord Extensions, notes past the 7th degree, namely the 9th, 11th or 13th, which could also be thought as 2nd, 4th and 6th. Adding these extensions, which are built by stacking triads on top of the original Em triad (see David Hodge’s column, The Power Of Three), is a standard practice of jazz musicians and is quite essential to developing the skills to improvise.

Em7 consists of 1,b3,5,b7 –) E, G, B , D

Chord extensions of Em7 might be :
Em9 : 1, b3,5,b7,9 or E,G,B,D,F#
Em11: 1,b3,5,b7,9,11 or E,G,B,D,F#, A
Em13 1,b3,5,b7,9,11,13 or E,G,B,D,F#,A C#
Em7/11 1,b3,5,b7,11 or E,G,B,D,A
Em (9/11) 1,b3,5,9,11 or E,G,B,F#,A

It would be impossible to execute all the notes from an Em13 chord on the guitar, since it only has six strings and the chord has seven notes. As the 1, 3 and 7 are essential notes to determine the chord family, you might omit the 5, 6 or 9 position.

Now, let’s experiment on a two -chord progression, the chords being Em7 and Cmaj7.

Chord extensions of Cmaj7 might be

Cmaj9 C E G B D
C add 9 C E G D
C 6/9 C E G A D
Cmaj7/6 C E G A B
Cmaj13 C E G B D A

Both chords and some of their extended forms are played all over the neck, but are still played off of the chord shapes. I specifically picked these chord shapes for this exercise because of their simplicity as well as their fresh, lush sound. Open and fretted notes are mixed which can lead to some beautiful colourful results.

So, let’s try this, shall we?

Pay close attention to the rhythms. Use a metronome or tap your foot on each beat of the measure (on the quarter notes). This exercise should be executed at a medium tempo, but you should always start out slowly in order to get the timing correct. Once you feel you have this, then gradually increase your speed.

Measures 1 and 2 start with the basic (first position) forms of Em7 and Cmaj7. In measures 3 and 4, we use our first chord extensions, Em9 and Cmaj9. You should notice that this voicing of the Em9 omits the B note (the fifth). The Cmaj9, in this voicing, is a great example of why 9’s are often thought of as 2’s, because the open D string is scrunched right in with the C and E to either side of it. That why it’s a good idea on this phrase to give a little breathing room between the initial appearance of the C and E, which start measure 4, and the D, which appears three notes later.

The Em7sus in measure 5 is a very interesting chord in that it is built on intervals of fourths: E, A, D and G. That’s just like your standard-tuned guitar! Harmony in fourths (or quartal harmony) has been very important in the development of modern jazz in the 1960’s – listen to McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis and Chick Corea. It also played a very important role in the music of such eclectic songwriters as Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell. Quartal harmony is a refreshing alternative to “tertial” chords (chords based on thirds) – an escape from both major and minor harmonies and the implied progressions that inevitable accompany them.

In measures 7 and 8 be certain to pay attention to the big intervals created by mixing open and fretted strings. Listen to difference in tone color in comparison to the chord voicings you used in the first two measures.

The Cmaj9 chord in the last measure requires a bit of a stretch! By playing the E note (12th fret on the first string) with your pinky when you play the Em9 in the proceeding measure, all you have to do is slide it down to frets for the D note in the Cmaj9. That should make it simpler for you to execute this rather tricky chord.

I hope you have lots of fun with these exercises in fingerstyle. Next time we will take this idea a step further and improvise over a part of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing.

Cheers

Also check out… Improvisation for the Fingerstlye Guitarist II

Here are the steps we’re going to approach improvising with:

• Record yourself playing chord changes.
• Play back the recording, while you play the pentatonic scale over it.
• Play with the pentatonic scale: pick any notes from the scale you want.
• Change to a minor pentatonic scale to add a blues feeling.

Before you begin doing these steps, you’ll want to practice this set of chord changes until you’re fairly smooth at it. In fact, using a metronome while you practice would be helpful to you. Here are the chord changes you’ll improvise over. Play these changes slowly, with a blues feeling.

Blues Changes

Once you can play this piece with a metronome, it’s time for you to become just as comfortable with the pentatonic scale. Practice the following tab until you can play it with a metronome. Note the arrows, which indicate alternate picking.

What is alternate picking, exactly? It’s a down-up pick stroke that lets you hit notes a lot faster than you could if you just used down-down or up-up strokes. To use alternate picking on the tablature here, do the following: strike the first note (C on string 6, fret 8) with a downstroke using your pick. Strike the next note, (D on string 6, fret 5), with the upstroke of the pick. For the next note, you’d return to using a downstroke.

For the remaining notes, continue changing from up to down stroke and back again. Changing from one string to another when you’re also changing the pick stroke direction is a challenge at first. It’s much easier to use alternate strokes on one string at a time. Stay with it. The alternate picking will eventually become second nature. For more about how to use alternate picking, see Picking Your Poison.

Pentatonic Scale

Once you can play the pentatonic scale with confidence, it’s time to record the changes and play over them. Using a tape recorder, computer, or some other device that lets you record and play back several minutes of music, record the chord changes.

Now for the fun. Once you’re satisfied with the recording, rewind it. Play the recording, and play the pentatonic scale.

How does it sound? If it sounds a little stiff to you, it’s time to play with the scale a bit. Rewind the recording, and begin playing it again. This time, instead of playing a strict up and down pentatonic scale, play whatever pentatonic notes you want.

Don’t be worried about hitting wrong notes. All the notes are the right notes. All you need to do is pick some notes and listen. If you still need some guidelines in choosing notes, check out the following tablature.

Continue doing this, finding new ways to play the pentatonic scale. To improvise truly means to play. Let yourself have fun. Alternate the melodic patterns you use. Re-record the chord changes with a different rhythm. There are endless ways of getting the music to sound better than before. When you take a break from your experiments, try this new variation:

Play exactly the same pentatonic scale, except move it up the neck by exactly three frets so that your first finger is on the eighth fret instead of the fifth.

In this new position, continue playing over the changes. How does it sound? Welcome to playing the Blues.

Resources

Book: Creativity in Improvisation, by Chris Azzara.

Marc Sabatella’s Jazz Improvisation Primer at http://www.outsideshore.com/primer/primer/ms-primer-3.html

Aebersold’s play along CDs: http://www.jazzbooks.com/playalongs/greatstarts/Default.htm

Here at Guitar Noise we’re always up for an ambitious undertaking. Over the next number of columns we’ll be examining the basic chord and fretboard theory that we already know and then use it to take that next step in playing. You’ll find how easy the concept of “moveable chords” can be and also learn your basic lead scales. We’ll then examine how these two techniques are used to come up with simple “tricks” to create fills, riffs and leads. We will not only analyze other guitarists’ leads, we’ll also come up with some of our own.

To make matters even more interesting, these columns will crossover with the upcoming lessons on both the beginners’ and intermediates’ pages. And that’s not to mention a few surprise columns (and co-authored pieces) that some of you have been clamoring for.

So let’s hunker down and have some fun. To paraphrase our Performance phrase, “Come on in and play!”

And, lest we forget:

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

Some of this initial stuff we have touched upon before. If you’re so inclined you might want to reread (or read for the first time) either Theory Without Tears or The Power of Three. If you’re really ambitious and want a little taste of what we’ll be exploring, then also read Multiple Personality Disorder. Just please do me a favor and make certain you know two things before we move on: the fact that all chords start out with a triad of root, third and fifth and the difference between a major and a minor chord. Are we cool with that? Whether you like it or not, in order to improve you have to learn something…

To me, in all seriousness, here is the difference between a beginner and an intermediate:

An intermediate guitarist is one that has started to think for his or herself.

He or she makes observations and then experiments in coming up with new things. It doesn’t matter if it’s as easy as a change in a strumming pattern, playing a Dsus4 instead of a D or playing a riff learned from one song during a different song because it has the same chord progression as the first. Whether this guitarist realizes it or not, she/he has taken the first steps toward developing a personal style.

Think about this: what makes a guitarist “good” or even just “interesting?” Often it is the little touches being thrown in here and there. A good guitarist makes the simple things interesting. He or she comes up with ways to make you want to listen to things. It may be nothing more than playing one chord in a different place on the fretboard, which is what today’s lesson is all about. I want you to forget about everything but the first three strings of your guitar. What we want to do is to look at the six basic chord shapes that occur on these strings.

Okay, we know that the two most basic kinds of chords are the major chord and the minor chord. We also know that they both are constructed by using the root, third and fifth of their respective scales or by starting with the root and stacking the correct thirds onto each other. Are you with me on this?

Now let’s think logically for a minute. If we want to play a chord that has three notes on three strings of the guitar, it stands to reason that each string has to have one note of the triad, correct? If the root is on one string, then the third and the fifth need to be on the other strings. That seems reasonable. We can also come to another conclusion – if we have each note on one string, then we will have three possible ways to play chord. These will be based on upon which string we’ve placed the root:

Remember that even though we have three (as yet unknown) shapes, we will have two forms of each shape – one for the major chord and one for the minor. But because you already know the diffence between a major an a minor chord is in the third (the root and fifth are still the same), you’ll see that there’s not all that much difference between the two forms of each shape.

The really cool thing is that you already know these shapes! You just may not realize that this knowledge is already in your mind and in your fingers!

Form 1 – “the E Shape”

What do you, personally, know about your guitar? Do you just make the chords according to the TAB or charts and think, “I know how to make a D chord!” or do you also take the time to know what notes make up that chord? A lot of people think that music theory is hard, but most of it, the stuff that can make you a better guitarist, has always been right at your fingertips.

Think about the simplest chords you know, the ones we call “first position” since they usually involve the use of open strings and are formed close to the nut of the guitar. Which of these chords have the root on the first string? Most likely, you can think of two: G and E. Maybe you thought of Em or F as well. Now let’s look at these chords and remember that, for today at least, we are only concerned with the notes on the first three strings:

You can see that, of these chords, the G major (in the first two forms) will not suit our purpose because it contains only two of the three notes of the chord on the first three strings. Depending on the variation you use, you will have either G, B, G (two roots and a third) or G, D, G (two roots and the fifth). But the G in its barre chord form as well as the first position E, Em and F work fine. These chords all have a root, third and fifth each on a separate string. I call these “E Shape” chords. Here are the major and minor forms of this shape and we’ve taken the trouble to show you where the root (R), 3rd and 5th are:

Those of you familiar with barre chords will recognize them as the top half of E major and E minor styled barre chords (and if you want to see a chart of those, you can find one in the column But Then Again…).

These chords, or more precisely, notes taken from these chord shapes, are used to do a lot of leads and fills, especially when changing from V to I or I to IV in music. Here is an example from the chorus of Van Morrison’s Wild Night:

Even though this fill is played only on the E and G strings, the E Shape chords of D, C, Bm and Am are what makes it work. When playing a run like this, I find it easiest to anchor your middle finger on the G string. This way I can use my index finger for the E string on the major chords (D and C here) and my ring finger for the minor chords (Bm and Am). By minimizing my hand movement I get both smoothness and speed.

Form 2 – “the D Shape”

Now let’s find some chords with their roots on the B (2nd) string. D, Dm and C fit the bill nicely:

To me, a C is a D shape chord. You’ve simply run out of room on the neck of the guitar! Anyway, here are your D Shapes for anywhere on the neck:

In the intro of the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses, you can hear the lead guitar using notes on the E and B strings that have been derived from the D shape:

Again, it’s really important to remember that all these shapes have both a major and a minor form. That’s why there’s a total of six of them. In this short lead line, we use the minor shape to get the two notes in the Bm and Am chords and then revert back to the major shape for the G. Here, since we are only using two strings, I find it easier to use the same fingers for each shape – the middle finger on the B string and the index finger for the E.

A lot of people like to use D shape chords. Here is the introduction to The End Of The Line by the Travelling Wilburys:

Notice how in the last phrase, we use chords in both the D shape (G, A and the final D) and the E shape (the first D and the Em) to climb up the scale. If your guitar doesn’t have a cutaway and that last D shape is hard to reach, do what I do and use the E shape D instead. It still sounds fine, especially on a twelve string.

Also, on this particular example you can use your open D and A strings to serve as a drone. The D shape lends itself nicely to this, particularly if you’re playing in the key of D or D minor.

Form 3 – “the A Shape”

The final shape has the root of the chord on the third (G) string. A and Am are the chords you probably already use with this shape:

Remember that when you slide this up the fretboard, you have to account for the open E string by placing your finger on it at the proper place, like this:

Probably the best known use of A shaped chords is in Stairway To Heaven. This takes place in the “…and it makes me wonder…” interludes:

This starts out with typical first position chords but then the final four chords of the progression are played up the neck. The G is a D shape and the D and C are done with the A shape.

And finally, just to give you more to think about, here, in Supertramp’s Even In The Quietest Moments, you can see all of these shapes in use:

And if you want to see a other good examples of the use of these chord shapes, check out the next Easy Songs For Beginners lesson, Love The One You’re With. And the upcoming song on the Intermediate’s Page, Supertramp’s Give A Little Bit, explores this technique with even more depth. I hope that you will check out these lessons and see exactly where and how you can use these moveable chord shapes to improving your own playing. Whether you are looking for a way to come up with the same chord voicings you hear on a recording or looking to make an arrangement of a song, whether you are trying to come up with a little riff or fill or even just use an old chord in a new way, these three shapes will give a place to start learning more about how to improve your playing.

Now it’s good to point out that when you use just parts of these shapes, you can blur the distinction between them. For instance, in the earlier example Wild Night, I could say that the chord progression D, C, Bm, Am (all in E shape) might just as easily be D (E shape), C (E shape), G (D shape), F (D shape). If you noticed this then pat yourself on the back – you’re starting to think. The fun of theory is seeing how different chords relate to each other. After all, changing one of the three note of one chord gives you a different chord. This is one of the many things that we will be looking at as we expand upon this topic, but for now, I think we’ll stop here to take in all that we’ve learned.

Whether you know it or not, you now have a really good reason to learn where the notes on your fretboard are. Not to mention learning the notes that go into a particular chord. Don’t go crazy thinking that you have to learn every note first. Simply take the time to reflect on what you are doing. Take the chords that you use most often – G, D, C, E, A, Bm and such and learn where they are using each of the three shapes. Here’s Bm. for example:

Learn one a week if that’s the easiest way for you. Write out the ones you use a lot – it’ll help them stick in your mind if you figure them out yourself. And, believe me, you’ll learn it a lot quicker if you use it in a song that you play a lot. Take Margaritaville or one of the other lessons on the Easy Songs For Beginners page. You’ll be surprised how quickly it comes to you when you use it for real instead of just thinking about it.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or topics you’d like to see discussed in future columns. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time (and always)…

Peace

Firstly let’s look at the traditional way that everyone views improvisation. Here it is, picture this. The room is filled with smoke and dimly lit. For, whatever reason the guitar player feels that he still needs to where sunglasses. The bass player starts to lay out a groove over a smokin’ beat being tossed off by the drummer. All of a sudden the guitar player starts to throw off these lines from nowhere and it all falls into place for one of the most memorable jams in a long time.

Okay now let’s wake up and look at reality. Nothing is ever thrown off the cuff. There is one universal law in physics that all must adhere to, and that is: “You can not make something out of nothing”. All those licks that a guitar player throws off are like words, an entourage of licks form what is called an “improvisational vocabulary”. Where the improvisation comes in is stringing these licks together to form a solo.

I once had the opportunity to attend a seminar with the classical guitarist Frederick Hand, who is widely known for his ability to improvise. During the class he had the audience call out three at random and he would improvise using those three notes,as the basis for his harmony and then would improvise over that. What he played was great. How does he do that? Actually it is quite elementary.

First of all let’s take three notes A, F#, and Eb. Then let’s look at the root chords we have to work with A: Major, Minor, Diminished, Augmented, Maj 7, Min 7, Augmented 7, Dom 7, as well as 9 ths, 11ths and 13 ths, and their inversions. This can be done as well for the F# and Eb. Then we have to establish some kind of key. it is important to remember also about enharmonic tones. For instance these three notes cannot work in a “traditional” key. The reason they cannot is because in order for it to be in Eb the A would have to be Flatted as well in order to keep with the order of falts ( B E A D G C F ). It will not fit in the key of A either. However, if we think of enharmonic tones like I mentioned earlier we can view the Eb as D# thus, making all these tones present in the key of E major or C# minor. You might be saying to yourself that You could not possibly make up an intersting harmonic progression out of these chords. Oh yes, you can! Think inversions. More specifficaly think 7th chords because they have the possibility of three inversions rather than triads which only have two. This particular arrangement of tones provides us with an easier way to end the whole thing bacause we can use a D# diminished chord (VII) to a E major 9 with an F# on the bottom to end it all. However some progressions are not that easy to figure out a final cadential formula. This is why we must study our theory boys and girls. We have become so familiar with the authentic cadence that other cadential possibilities seem to elude us. One of the cadences that is overlooked is the Plagal cadence (IV-I).

What I have just spelled out is easy when you can sit down and think it out on paper. The real test comes at a moments notice, when we are bombarded with notes that we have to take and mold into a musical coherence. How do you do it? There is only one answer. Use it! practice these techniques, at first on paper then on the fretboard. The real trick is to be able to recall this information at the drop of a hat. This is why it must be practiced on a daily basis. Here is a list of things that you should work on to improve your improvisation:

1. Scales. You should practice all your major and minor scales in all of their forms and positions, as well as diminished scales, whole tone, pentatonics ( yes even classical players should know their pentatonics).
2. Chords. You should be able to play a chord for every tone in the chromatic scale. For each note you should be able to play a Major, Minor, Diminished, Augmented, Major 7, 9, 11, 13 and all of it’s inversions, in several positions. Do the same thing for minor 7, 9, 11, 13, so on and so forth. Leave no chord unturned. And do not buy a chord book. Chord books are evil because they suppress the analytical thought process. Figure it out for yourself! Use your gray matter.

After a while of doing this you will begin to build up your own “improvisatory vocabulary” and you will begin to transpose things into different keys, that you will use depending on what notes you have with which to build your harmony.

The above method is only one way in which to think about it. There are many ways to go about improvising. The other way is based around improvising within a set score of music. This way is geared towards the classical guitarist who is playing the set repertoire. As you know when your playing something like a Bach cello suite, or The usher waltz by Nakita Koshkin you are bound by the written note. However, you are not bound by any type of phrasing or dynamics or color. These boundries are set only by you personal taste. One way to practice these different effects is to use scales.

Try playing a scale straight through with no dynamics, no color. After that now try a crescendo on the way up and a decrescendo on the way down. Then while doing the crescendo ascending try moving the hand to ponticello, then when decrescendo on the way down move the hand to tasto. Then add some phrasing. When ascending while you crescendo and move your hand ponticello. Ritard and do a small decrescendo beginning on the fifth scale degree, pause slightly on the seventh scale degree to hang on the tension and build excitement. Then, release the tension and hang on the tonic to accentuate the arrival point before we descend again. Don’t forget to descend with a decrescendo while we move our hand tasto. Also, begin a ritard on the third scale degree so that you can create a feeling of coming home. When you finally play the tonic play it so that it is barely audible and really lay into some vibrato to really warm it up. This is only one way to think of a phrase. There are an infinite number of ways you can play scales. The key is to never just play scales, play them with a purpose. By doing this you begin to facilitate a technique with which you can express you inner most thoughts and desires. What is so improvisatory about this is that just because you felt on way about a passage in the practice room doesn’t mean you will feel the same way about it on the stage. We have a tendency to be swallowed up by the moment and if you are prepared you can open the doors and let that spirit of spontaneaty in rather than suppress it.

Next time I thought we might discuss rasgueados and dive into a little flamenco! Until then God speed and keep the fingers moving.