My Guitar Solos Were Boring Until...

when I was a lot younger and I had finally worked up enough courage and skill to play in bands here in Vancouver it was only after a few shows that I realized my solos are boring I didn't know what the problem was I I knew all my pentatonic shapes up and down the fretboard I had a lot of Hot Licks I had some skill I had good sense of Rhythm and I had plenty of speed at least for classic rock and blues but somehow my solos just still sounded all the same and then one day I was listening to Crossroads by Cream and I was listening closely to Eric Clapton solo and that's when it hit me I heard it I could figure out what it was that was the difference that was the thing that I wasn't doing and I realized nobody had taught me how to do that now this was quite some years ago this was before YouTube you know you couldn't just look things up and get lessons like this all the time I learned how to play guitar from in-person lessons from books and I mean lots of books guitar magazines and if you can believe it VHS tapes but there was at that point in my guitar and musical development I could hear the difference I could hear what Clapton and all those other guitar players had been doing they were changing from major pentatonic to minor pentatonic and doing it at a very specific moment that makes great musical sense [Music] hey [Music] so when I teach this a lot of times students will just kind of switch from A major pentatonic to minor pentatonic at any moment and that kind of works but it's actually harder to make it sound cool when you just do it willy-nilly if you choose the right moments then it's easier to get the concept down and it's easier to make the concept sound like you mean it because you're going to end up playing some notes that have quite a bit of tension when you switch from major pentatonic to minor pentatonic so we want to do it like we really mean it and a great place to do that is just doing it when you switch from the one chord to the IV chord like so many songs do like the 12 Bar Blues does like any blue song does goes from one to four in this case a chord to D chord so the easiest way to do that is just to think from Easy shape A major pentatonic [Music] to easy shape a minor pentatonic while that was major pentatonic because my pinky was on the a so I just put my first finger on the A and I play the exact same shape and I get minor pentatonic I call that the first finger pinky rule which all my students learned that when Pinky's on the root and you play easy shape it's major pentatonic when first finger is on the root and you play the easy shape it's minor pentatonic it's really easy so now we do have to shift up to make that change but it's not very far it's just a few Frets so let's say the song is on an a chord right and I'm playing my major pentatonic over the a chord [Music] all right that was the a now the song is going to the four chord of D chord and I'm just gonna jump up and switch to minor pentatonic [Music] and you don't even really have to play anything that fancy because what we're doing now by making that uh scale switch it is fancy you could play any lick you already know and it's kind of funny because we're using the same scale shape we've just moved it so in fact you could even play exactly the same like twice so let's hear that again here's the one chord A we hear it in context I'll play whatever major pentatonic [Music] okay and then four chord is D and I jump up and I think a minor pentatonic [Music] you can hear how dissonant that note suddenly sounds when we've made the change of scales because we had these sounds that are all major pentatonic it just resolves so well almost too well on a major chord that's not too well I love it I love how it sits on the major chord because it just it melds it melts into the cord right it's like you can't you cannot go wrong there's no distance there and then when we hear the minor pentatonic we hear that distance because that c natural is not in the scale of a major [Music] principles of thinking when you're on the one chord in a use a major pentatonic [Music] and when you're on the IV chord in a you can use minor Pence on it [Music] so you don't need um to be thinking about the music theory in great depth while you're playing it's useful to know the music theory in one day but I mean when we're playing I'm not necessarily thinking that that's a c natural I'm just thinking pentatonic shapes and I am thinking I'm going from major pentaton to minor Pentatonix that's all we need and we know how to play these shapes because we've practiced them a lot so one really important tip that I give to all my students who are learning this technique is that when you're starting out trying this this switch from major pentatonic to minor pentatonic start your minor pentatonic licks from that note from that c that we're talking about from that minor third not saying that you have to do that always but if you're new to this technique there's a huge advantage to starting on that note the advantage is this that the note as we said is going to be dissonant because it's not in the key of a major and so we want our ears or our audience's ears to know that we mean this distance this dissonance is not a mistake we are pushing hard on that note because we're telling our ears or our audience that this distance is intentional I mean it so you got to play it like you mean it and it's easier to play it like you mean it if you make it the very first note of the change right so when I'm on the one chord I'm in a major pentatonic I play whatever [Music] and then I'm on the D chord and you'll notice that almost always I go straight to that note [Music] because it is the one that is making the biggest difference that's what I mean to say it's the one that's making the biggest difference between those two scales so if you hit it first and then play whatever else in minor pentatonic it'll sound cool because it's like you're saying this distance yes I'm pushing on this on purpose that is the note that we want right so you're going to practice just thinking major pentatonic shape [Music] that's a root you can end on there and a minor pentatonic shape pushing on the minor third [Music] now let's look at some more close ways of doing the switch because right now we're using easy shape to easy shape which is fine and we do it all the time ain't nothing wrong with it but we want some options right we want to be able to switch scales in the same area sometimes we don't want to always have to make big jumps so to do that we need to know what is our major pentatonic shape right in this area because the minor pentatonic shape we know that's our easy minor Penton shape we always learn first so our major pentatonic shape can be just the box so we call this the box it's like the extension is this five note piece here I mean there's a bigger this whole piece to it but for now let's just use the box [Music] right we have from my video The Incredible chord scale connector if that's a major chord the this incredible chord scale connector is because we can see scale shape right inside the chord pretty much right so that's my one chord [Music] and then the song goes to the D chord right and we already know what to do we're going to push on that minor third there [Music] sounds cool now we can go back to the song might go back to a and we can go back to major pentatonic and bring back that kind of happy very satisfied the sound that fits in the chord so nicely right let's try back to D [Music] and back to a [Music] D minor pentatonic right I mean I don't get tired of this like it's so cool it stands out and curiously if we if we study that note a little bit more let's think major pentatonic shape again for a sec and remember where is the Blue Note in that major pentatonic shape the blue note is right here [Music] interesting that the blue note of that major pentatonic is that very note that I've been talking about of minor pentatonic right it's the minor third so again this is the detail of it that you don't need to memorize but if you're really into this kind of stuff the blue note of major pentatonic is in the minor pentatonic scale and maybe that's one of the reasons yeah one of the reasons why making this switch sounds so cool is because they do share some of the same sounds even though the minor pentatonic is so much more dissonant right so one chord box shape foreign minor pentatonic shape from there [Music] so you can use this in a blues context you can use this in a classic rock context you can use this in a country context you can use this in so many different styles of music and just remember that in essence and in my opinion the best way to to use this technique is to go from major pentatonic on the one chord to minor pentatonic on the IV chord smash that like And subscribe if you aren't already because this channel is just starting to take off we're going from like hundreds of views to thousands of views in only a couple weeks and I really thank you all for watching these videos and that means there's lots more great videos coming thanks a lot everyone

Channel: GuitarLessonsVancouver

Views: 83,924

Keywords: guitar lesson, guitar lessons, music theory, pentatonic, guitar solo, blues guitar, guitar soloing, guitar solo lesson, intermediate guitar lessons, electric guitar lesson, Blue Morris, Vancouver guitar lessons

Id: K9QdVkZIxAo

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023