5 Pentatonic Tricks For Ultimate Blues-Rock

as guitarists it seems we're always searching for the right scale to play but as you're about to see in the true Spirit of rock and roll the right notes are often the wrong notes and in this video I'm going to break down five techniques to get you playing solos like this [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] this style of playing is based around using a minor scale over a major chord progression so in this case the track is in a major but we're going to be using a minor pentatonic this idea comes from the blues where it became normal particularly for singers to bend notes flat then after a while it became normal just to use scales with those flat notes naturally in them [Applause] [Music] so in this video we're going to be focusing on the a minor pentatonic which of course looks like this [Music] now just to show you the difference between using the a minor pentatonic versus the a major let me get an A chord going now here's the A major pentatonic over this and a minor now you can really hear that the a minor has that much more bluesy sound but if you just go playing an A Minor Scale over an a major chord it's probably gonna sound terrible so here are five techniques to help you do it in a musical way [Music] resolving to the root so no matter what we play Within this minor scale as long as we come back to our root note of a it's going to sound solicitor like our lines are grounded in the same place as our a major chord progression so there's a few places we can find our root note of a within this pentatonic shape firstly here fifth fret of the lowie then again of course fifth fret on the high e and then here seventh fret on the D string [Music] so we just focus on this note and how we can resolve to it well firstly we could come from below from the G below [Music] or we would result to it from above from this C here the minor third [Music] so coming back to this a note really keeps our lines grounded in the key signature now the other place I really like to play the root note of a is instead of playing it here fifth fret of the high e we can get to the same note by bending up on the eighth fret of the b a full step now this is a really great place to play your root notes and brings us on to technique number two which is string bending [Music] so there are three main bends you really need to know for this style of playing we've just seen the first one there the root note band now in this case you're aiming to be dead in tune with the note we're aiming for which of course is an A so I recommend just play that a and then do your Bend and try and get it dead in tune with that now I like to bend it up and once I found the note then give it a bit of vibrato the second bed you need to know is on the flat third the C here and what we're playing here is just a micro tonal Bend so we're not aiming for another note we're just pushing it slightly sharp and a really great way to play this is to let the note sound out and then bend up slightly just before you move on to the next note [Music] so this note here this C really belongs to we're in the key of a major which has a C sharp in it so what you don't really want is this satin with lots of that over the top so just using this little Bend adds a little bit of movement to the note and makes it that little bit more palatable to The Listener and of course has a great Blues feel to it and then thirdly what I call the universal pentatonic Bend which is on this note here seventh fret of the G string this D note here so we can bend this up a full step to an E [Music] foreign technique for this style of playing [Music] but also with this note we could bend it up just a half step for a more bluesy sound [Music] so full step half step [Music] for technique number three let's have a look at how we can add some extra notes to our a minor pentatonic scale shape [Music] we just saw that little half step bluesy bend on the seventh fret of the G string [Music] the water back instead of bending up to that note we simply played it directly which would be here one fret higher eighth fret on the G string now this note here is an E flat and when we add it to the a minor pentatonic it simply becomes the a minor blues scale and as you can hear the minute we hit that note it's instant Blues feel [Applause] [Music] recommend hanging around on it too long and two ways I really like to play it is just with a little Grace note so a slide off it to the note below works really well or playing it as a sting so I'm going to play the note below [Music] onto it quite quickly and that's what you heard me doing in the main solo so now on the G string we've got these three notes of Frets five seven and eight but we can also play this same pattern on the B string five seven eight and on the high e five seven eight [Music] so sounds a bit crazy on its own like that but having the same pattern on three strings together really opens up a lot of opportunities so we've already discussed that adding in this extra note of the eighth fret of the G string to our pentatonic shape gives us that a minor blues scale sound [Applause] then adding these extra two notes are the seventh fret on the B and high e strings gives us an F sharp on the B string and a B on the high e now really these two notes added in this context give us a kind of a Dorian type scale but we really don't need to worry about modes here what we can think about is how the pattern allows us to create licks so for example all of the notes of the seventh fret on these three strings sound great if you bend them up to the note of the eighth fret or alternatively like I did in the main solo you could play them as a kind of Sting again [Music] like that [Music] on to technique number four and let's look at some double stops starting with these two notes of the fifth fret of the B and the high e strings together so as these two notes are an e and an a they're going to work perfectly over the a major chord so they're really useful in this context of playing minor over major now the classic ways to play these are either to slide into it we all know that sound or the bend on the seventh fret the G string Bend up and then play those two notes together rock and roll technique then staying at the fifth fret let's move down a string to play the G and B strings together now this time we've got a C and an e isn't always going to sound good but what we can do is give a little Bend up on this again that microtonal bend just to make it a bit more palatable now the chances are when you try and bend up on the G string the B string is going to move with you but there is a way that you can kind of let your finger slide so the B string sounds mostly you know mostly as it should it might go a little bit Out Of Tune but certainly it helps just give it that little Bend up something like that then let's move that up two Frets so G and B strings again but the seventh fret this time I normally play with my third finger here so we've got a D and an F sharp those extra notes we looked at a moment ago coming into play and this time we can bend both of these notes up together foreign something like that and then lastly we want to be able to play an E and A G together but clearly in our pentatonic shape they're both on the B string so what we need to do is bring this e up to the ninth fret on the G string here and then we can play it together with the G on the eighth fret of the B string and really this brings out a real A7 type sound with that flat seven on top [Music] foreign yeah so lastly technique number five is blending in the major scale so we've been focusing on this a minor pentatonic shape [Music] but the other scale we could have been using is of course the A major pentatonic which is really the same as the F sharp minor pentatonic the same shape just three Frets down [Music] you see whenever you play the minor pentatonic like that the first note tells you which minor key you can use it over so F sharp minor and the second note tells us which major key we can use that shape over so F sharp minor and a the same shape works for both now there's a lot said about blending minor and Majors together but sometimes there's no need to over complicate it and we can just play a lick from each scale back to back so in the solo you saw me taking this a major slash F sharp minor pentatonic shape actually moving it up 12 Frets so now I'm at the 14th this position I'm playing those country style country style country style string on string bands something like that but then straight back into the a minor pentatonic this time at the 17th fret for that kind of lick to end with so we're going from a very major sound so into a very minor sound and that can work really effectively so just know that when you're playing in minor you can quickly switch into major and of course vice versa [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so thanks for watching I hope that's useful and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Jules Guitar

Views: 63,722

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Id: ZL0q7qCiXUQ

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023