10 Simple (Yet Amazing) Blues-Rock Theory Hacks

in this video 10 Simple Theory Concepts that will make you a better guitar player now whenever I make YouTube videos there's always some interruptions there's normally things like ambulance sirens today is the first time a monkey has turned up whilst I've been making a video and he's a little bit aggressive as you can see anyway back to the guitar so I thought I'd ease us into the new year with quite a low intensity video just of some little guitar Theory hacks I've put together you know the kind of thing that you'll see and think oh I never knew that before you can put it to work straight away we'll kind of go from beginner up to intermediate and we've got some scales chords bends double stops coming up so I hope you enjoy let's start with number one which chords go together so when working out which chords go together there's a really simple pattern we can use which looks like this [Music] so wherever we start let's say the fifth fret here on the low E this a note we can play the E shape bar chord from there is an a chord then all we're going to do is go up at the same fret to the a string and from there play the a shape bar chord which of course is a d chord then on the a string up two Frets play the a shape bar chord again an E chord so a d and e will always go together you don't have to play them here you can play them here or anywhere else on the guitar but you know these three chords belong together now most people already know from experience that a d and e go together but what about d flat g flat and a flat or F sharp B and C sharp so this pattern just helps you to know which chords fit together now it also works with minor chords but I'm going to come back to that in just a moment number two the sweet versus bluesy sound now back to our a d and e there's different ways we can play these chords for different types of sounds so for a really sweet and soft sound try playing them all As two chords like this [Music] then for a more crunchy bluesy sound maybe play them all as seventh chords and use this second finger to hammer on for that extra bluesy feel [Music] so the same chords completely different sounds number three the three fret rule for which major minor chords go together so a moment ago I mentioned you can use that exact same pattern for minor chords as well but to know which minor chords go with which made a chords you just need to know the three fret rule which says when you play a major chord like this this a major here at the fifth fret all you need to do is go down three Frets and play A minor chord so down to the second fret and play it as a minor okay F sharp minor so a major and F sharp minor will always go together these chords three Frets apart are known as the relative major and minor now I can play that same pattern starting from F sharp down here so F sharp minor then up to the a string B minor and then up two Frets C sharp minor so F sharp minor B minor and C sharp minor will always go together now you'll see that each of these minor chords is three Frets down from a corresponding major chord so a major goes to F sharp minor D major goes to B minor and E major C sharp minor now between these six chords you have all the main chords that you're going to want to know how to play together and of course this works in any key for example C major we get c f and g and then a minor D minor and an E minor on to number four and let's see how this three fret rule applies to the pentatonic now moving on to scales but sticking with this idea of the three fret rule for relative major and minor if we play a pentatonic scale like here in a minor [Music] you'll see that these first two notes are three Frets apart this a and this C and the chords that go with those notes would be a minor and C major and this tells us something really important that not only can we use this scale over the key of A minor but we can also use it when playing over C major so when you play the minor pentatonic like that first note will always tell you which minor key you can use this shape over and the second note which major key you can use it over number five turning the pentatonic into the blues scale now whilst we're on the topic of the pentatonic a lot of people don't realize that the blues scale is just the pentatonic scale with one extra note added so here in a minor we just need to add in an E flat which becomes our blue note making this the blues scale now the most obvious place to do that would be here at the eighth fret on the G string and as soon as I hit on that note you'll start to hear that Blues coming out [Music] the other place we can have one in Is Here sixth fret on the a string this E flat here and you immediately get that bluesy feel number six playing minor over major Blues then for the ultimate bluesy feel I recommend playing this minor blues scale over a major key so for example if we're in C major I'm going to play this as a seven chord with that hammer on with my second finger that we looked at earlier what I'm going to play over the top of that is a C minor blues scale so it's the C minor pentatonic with our blue note added [Music] and then I'm going to get something which sounds like this [Music] number seven and now let's look at play major over a minor chord so that super bluesy sound comes from playing minor over a major chord but what if you want to play major over a minor chord how would that work well let me give you an example here in B minor and you'll see why I've picked this key in a moment so the relative major of B minor is up three Frets D major and now anything that you normally play in D Major you can play over this B minor chord and it's going to sound great now I picked this key because with a D major chord down here most people have got a few little tricks that they use [Music] you know hammer-ons and pull-ups on that chord so we can use any of that over our B minor chord and it's going to sound great and you know maybe come up here Edge type stuff as well so take a listen to this I'll get a B minor chord going in the background and then play some of that stuff over the top [Music] then number eight the universal pentatonic Bend when bending strings there's one note which is a little bit more important than all the others and it's what I call the universal pentatonic Bend so let's take an example here in a minor using the a minor pentatonic and the note in question is this one here the second note on the G string in this shape here at the seventh fret now why is this note so important for bending well firstly we often play in this little box of four notes Here on the d and g strings and by making a full step Bend up we complete a full pentatonic scale of five notes in this position one two three four five so little looks like that come from using that bend the second reason is we can get to the Blue Note through this band so if I just make a little half note Bend up there's our blue note [Music] or pre-bend it up half a step and that that sounds great for blues and then lastly you can play multi-step bends from this note so listen to this I'll be starting on the D bending up a full step to an E another half step up to the F and then back down to the e [Music] [Applause] [Music] and that's such a sweet sound number nine string on string bends sticking with bending and let's look at how we can easily play some of those country style string on string bends you know this sort of thing so to do this it's pretty easy we just need to play an A shape bar chord like this D here at the fifth fret now wherever this chord starts let's just play the top two strings at that same fret so the fifth fret here the top two strings with my two last fingers and I'm just going to play them together and bend up the note on the B string a full step and now this Bend is going to fit perfectly over that D chord same again we can move up to the E chord and play the seventh fret and then we could go on to an a chord and play at the 12th fret [Music] so then I could play something like this [Music] then finally number 10 let's look at some double stops now just like we could play string on string bends Around chords we can also play double stops Ryan chords so if you take any e shape bar chord like this the notes on the top two strings you can play together slide up to Frets and slide back down again and it's always going to sound great something like this [Music] so that's the end of the list I hope it was useful let me know in the comments if you want to see more content on any of these ideas but for now thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Jules Guitar

Views: 146,809

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Id: wgYShQLNnow

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 14 2023