segue into lead technique?

Here's the order I'd tackle them in, Alma:

1. Arm yourself with some backing tracks. Keep the first ones real simple, I-IV-V progressions.
2. Learn one minor pentatonic pattern - I'd start with the one that puts the root on the 6th string under the 1st finger.
3. Work within that pattern, and develop hammer-on and pull-off skills. Also start working with bends... but you'll get into bends more after adding a couple more positions; not all notes bend well in a key
4. Add the patterns on either side (fourth finger root, and second finger b3)
5. Add slides to move from position to position
6. Add the other two positions
7. Start working on your vibrato
8. Go back to the beginning, and work with the same fingering patterns as the major pentatonic scale - you're just changing a tonal center.
9. Next you want to explore either the blues scale (pentatonic with a b5 added) or diatonic scales. Depending on your style of music, the first diatonic scale I teach is either the major scale or the Dorian mode - which is the minor pentatonic with two notes added to it.
10. Depending on your musical tastes, there will be other techniques to incorporate - economy picking, sweeping, tapping, harmonics, etc. Start talking to players you admire and get advice.

Three's going to be other stuff too... how to structure a solo, how to create "riffs", how to get a good rhythmic hook going, etc. Take a few lessons if you can; if you can't, spend a lot of time listening and trying to re-create what you hear. You'll get better and better at it over time.

This might help too - it's an article I wrote for PlayGuitar! magazine last year that they've posted to the web: Solo Flight

thanks NoteBoat! :)

~Alma

Hey P-Love, Great question but I have another one for NoteBoat so I hope you don't mind if I hi-jack your thread? :)

NoteBoat: Here's my quesiton, and thank you so much for that article, I missed that issue last year.

You mentioned using the first pattern, using the index as the root on the 6th (1st) strings.
Say for a song in the key of C I would use that first pattern, finding the C on the 8th Fret with my index finger. I get that :) (Finally)

However, that's all I know is that first pattern.

How do the others work? Say if I'm looking for something in the key of D but starting at the 10th fret is a bit too high on the Fret board and I know there are other notes I could use down in the register.

Would I use a pattern that has that D on the 5th Fret, 5th string as the root? If for arguments sake the first pattern is 'root 6' would this second pattern be 'root 5' ?

And with that same pattern I could essentially slide down to the 3rd fret/root 5 for a C scale eh? Is that how it works?

(If so I think I'm starting to get it) Tee-Hee.

Fitting together the 5 patterns/boxes in my head was the basis for creating my pentatonic flash tool (here), hence the transparent sliding thingies that allow you to see the other boxes and how they fit together when just one is highlighted.

One thing that helped me that isn't in that tool (yet), is that you'll notice there's a pattern that the root notes follow. In every box there's a shape spanning two strings like this:
|-x-|-b-|-x-|---|
|-m-|---|---|-M-|

(where m= minor root, M = major root, x = note, b = blue note.)

In the first box, it's on the 6th string. In the second box it's on the 4th string, third box 2nd string, fourth box 5th string and finally the 5th box it's on the 3rd string (but the shape is skewed because of the G-B boundary). Learn that pattern of notes and how it fits into the boxes as you learn them and it becomes much easier to choose a box based on the position you want to play in. For your example of D-minor-pentatonic-but-not-as-high-as-the-10th-fret, say you wanted about the 5th fret instead - you know that the 5th fret of the 5th string is a D, and that box 4 has the above mentioned pattern of root notes on the 5th string, so using box 4 at the fifth gives you D minor pentatonic.

Not exactly, Dagwood...

Guitarists like to work with fingerings, because if you don't have any open strings a pattern is easily transposed - just move the same fingering to a different position. But that automatic transposition only works up and down the neck, not across the strings. If you want to start from the 5th string C the 5th, 4th, and 3rd strings will have the same pattern as the "first position", but the 1st and 2nd strings will be different.

That's because scales are collections of notes rather than fingerings. If you look at the notes in the first position scale in C, they're C-Eb-F-G-Bb. So when you want to play in a different place on the neck (but stay in the key of C), you have to find those notes. In third position they'll be:

6th string 3rd fret (G)
6th string 6th fret (Bb)
5th string 3rd fret (C)
5th string 6th fret (Eb)
4th string 3rd fret (F)
4th string 5th fret (G)
3rd string 3rd fret (Bb)
3rd string 3rd fret (C)
2nd string 4th fret (Eb)
2nd string 6th fret (F)
1st string 3rd fret (G)
1st string 6th fret (Bb)

Make sense?

That's also why the pentatonic scale has five different fingerings in a key - the scale has five notes, so each of them can be the lowest 6th string note in some position. Because of the guitar's tuning, no two starting notes put all the other scale tones in the same places.

6th string 3rd fret (G)
6th string 6th fret (Bb)
5th string 3rd fret (C)
5th string 6th fret (Eb)
4th string 3rd fret (F)
4th string 5th fret (G)
3rd string 3rd fret (Bb)
3rd string 5rd fret (C)
2nd string 4th fret (Eb)
2nd string 6th fret (F)
1st string 3rd fret (G)
1st string 6th fret (Bb)

Make sense?

Right OK. So if I reasked my question. I know the first pattern(position) and in "C" I would start that pattern with my index, as a reference point, on the 8th fret (6th or 1st string) for

(I'm talking Minors)

C Minor - 1st Pattern/Position
8-11
8-11
8-10
8-10
8-10
8-11

So question was: If I wanted to use the C on the 5th string 3rd Fret as the root, because the other pattern is an octive higher or (if not right term, they are too high in the register of notes) I'd then have to use a Different pattern yes?
The one you mentioned above.

So instead I'd use this?

3-6
3-6
3-5
3-5
4-6
3-6

If yes, I guess that was the question, ( I don't know how to ask them correctly sometimes). I would have to change the 'pattern/position of the scale.

And.. you guys are awesome. Thanks for taking the time.

Yep, that's right.

It's not an octave different, though - it's the exact same pitch. C on the 6th string 8th fret should be the same as C on the 5th string 3rd fret - so you're playing the same pitches (most of them, anyway) in a different place on the neck.

An octave is the next note of the same letter name higher or lower, so an octave up from 6th string 8th fret C would be at:

2nd string 1st fret
3rd string 5th fret
4th string 10th fret
5th string 15th fret or
6th string 20th fret

There won't be a C an octave lower (as long as you're in standard tuning)

Thanks for the explanation NoteBoat! :)

Now to see if I understand it...

I know that first minor pentatonic pattern (index finger on root on 6th string). But let's say I wanted to move where I was playing to somewhere else... For the Cm pentatonic, the notes in that scale fall on frets 1,3,6,8,11 of the 6th string. So I could pick any of those points, and start building a pattern from there. The 8th fret gives us the initial pattern, the 3rd fret gives us the pattern Dagwood built.

But I could also choose between the two, and build a pattern that ends on the 6th fret (for the lowest note), and have something like
E 6-8 (Bb - C)
B 6-8 (F - G)
G 5-8 (C - Eb)
D 5-8 (G - Bb)
A 6-8 (Eb - F)
E 6-8 (Bb - C)

(That's something else that confused me, which order is this normally written, low string on top, or high string on top?)

Which would probably place my index finger on the 5th fret position, starting the scale with my 4th finger on the root. Correct?

Absolutely correct!