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Which Scale: Improvising With Pentatonics
The stage is set. The fans have gathered and the band opens up with it’s first song. Quick, it’s time for a solo, but what do you play? That’s easy. We’ll just improvise! “To improvise means to make it up on the spot, right?”, you ask. Yes, we’re going to make the solo up as…
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Pentatonic Scale
The word pentatonic gets it’s name from the Greek word “penta” which means 5 and tonic which stands for tone. That’s what pentatonic scales are: 5 tone scales. There are only 5 basic pentatonic patterns. They are the C, A, G, E, and D. They are similar to the 5 basic chord patterns, because they can be closely associated…
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Moving Scale Shapes
There is a big difference between a scale pattern and the actual scale. The actual scale is only 5 notes. When we are learning scale patterns we are learning the location of the notes from the scale as they appear on the fretboard. The same 5 notes repeat themselves over and over on the guitar’s fretboard. What we need…
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What is chord phrasing?
Chord phrasing is art of taking a chord progression and turning it into a means of personal expression. Chord phrasing allows you total freedom during the performance of a song to do anything you can imagine with the song’s chord structure. In other words, when playing rhythm guitar you don’t have to just play the…
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Open Pentatonic Scale Shapes
These patterns can be used in your soloing and to play over their representative open chords. As usual I have included at least 2 diagrams for each pattern. The 1st diagram shows the pattern with it’s correct fingerings and the second diagram shows the chord counterpart that they are associated with. The A, E, and D style patterns have some…
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How To Read A Scale Diagram
Scale diagrams are like a snapshot of your guitar’s fretboard. This lesson will help you to learn to read scale diagrams for guitar. Scale diagrams are a great way to learn new scales.
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Beginner Lead Lesson #1
A lot of blues guitar leads are improvised. That means that they are making up their leads as they go along, right? That’s true to a certain extent, but every good guitar player has a “trick bag” of guitar licks that he/she can pull from at any time. In this beginner blues lead lesson you’ll add several common licks to…
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Beginner Blues Guitar Lead Lesson 2
You should master lesson 1 before you tackle this lesson. This lesson builds from it. In this lesson we’re going to take the scale and licks that we learned in lesson 1 and practice them against a backing track. Backing Track This backing track track is just a standard blues progression in the key of A. This rhythm…
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The Right Wrong Notes
Beyond The Box When playing music we can use scales as a guide which will tell us what notes will work best for a particular song. The pentatonic scale is a good example. The five notes in the pentatonic are all you need sometimes, but at some point may players want to be able to…
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E Harmonic Minor
The harmonic minor scale has a very distinct sound to it. If you’ve ever heard Yngwie Malmsteen then you’ve heard the scale in action, because it’s just about the only scale the Swedish guitar master plays. It the primary scale used in the Neo-Classical movement led by Malmsteen.