Play the blues by visualizing a triangle and a square on the neck - EASY blues guitar lesson - EP380

all right so typically i start off with me playing through a song at the beginning of these videos and i do that to grab your attention and just sort of let you know what's to come but i wanted to start off this week with a different uh approach because i think this is more of an attention grabber maybe than the song itself now we do have a song it's a really cool blues it's slow and easy and everyone will be able to play this i don't care where you are as a player this is very easy and it sounds awesome so we're going to break that down in just a second here but the reason i'm starting this way is to let you know that we're going to be playing out of two shapes we're going to be using a triangle and a square i mean it is it doesn't get any easier than this if you can visualize this triangle and square on the neck you're going to be able to play major pentatonic minor pentatonic some of you don't even know what that means we're going to break that down and we're going to explain it all and if the reason i'm doing it this way is even if you've been playing for years and years sometimes it helps to look at something a little different because you can be very expressive with these two shapes that's why i like this it gets your head out of the game you're not like caught up with what are the chord changes is this the minor second or none of that stuff this is can i picture the triangle can i picture the square and i'll show you how to go back and forth between major and minor pentatonic scale it's very very cool way of looking at it so let me go ahead and show you the song we're going to learn and then we'll talk through it [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Laughter] all right so if you're just joining us my name is brian and i do lessons like this every friday and i've been doing it for many years and i would encourage you to subscribe to my youtube channel if you haven't clicked the subscribe button click it it's free it doesn't cost anything just click that you can also click the alert bell the little gray bell so you can be alerted when i put out new lessons like this which i do every week so uh also we're going to break down everything note for note everything that i play in the intro i'm going to do the whole thing in this video if however you'd like to get the tablature the mp3 jam track and also as an added bonus i'm going to show you how to play the rhythm which actually works really nice on its own it's like an another composition it's a little finger style thing i got all of that tabbed out now that's all for premium members if you want those things you can go to activemelody.com go to the weekly lessons page and do a search for ep380 that's a lesson number for this lesson okay let's break this down so we're going to talk through triangle and square let me show you how to find them first i'm just going to we're going to go right for the specific frets and then we're going to talk about how to think about them how to use them in different keys all of that stuff so the first note i want you to find sixth fret third string and then we're gonna go fifth fret and seventh fret on the second string now look at that what's going on there you can see on the screen so i have superimposed a triangle that's how i think about that it's just a little triangle that happens there between the second and third string and hopefully you can see that this sixth fret third string is the tip of that triangle and then these two notes are the base of it now if i look at this corner of the uh of the base of that triangle i can now go from the seventh fret to the ninth fret on the second string and do the same thing on the first string that's the square i know some of you may think it's a rectangle a rectangle square i'm just calling it a square but you get the point i've got a square that's connected to a triangle and all of that that we played would be the e major pentatonic scale listen to it with an e in the bass [Music] you can hear that sound it's got kind of that happy it's got a little bit of a blues feel but to me it always i always think of the allman brothers kind of dicky betts playing you know it's just got that happy jam band kind of sound it you can you can think of country music lots of different styles come out of that major pentatonic scale now we're going to get into the minor pentatonic scale too using those same two shapes but before we do that you need to understand how this all works over an e so as i mentioned that work that sounds great if you're playing an e in the bass because that's the e major pentatonic scale now here's how you connect it to something tangible so if we think about the e chord uh but we're playing the e chord up here using the d chord shape so think of your d chord if you were to slide it up two frets then you'd be playing an e chord well look at the tip of that that's a triangle as well but that's i don't want to distract this here but if you look at where that note is the fifth fret second string that's your e note out of that chord that note is in the base of the triangle do you see it so now you have connected your e chord using that d chord shape out of caged you've connected that note to the triangle so let's just quiz yourself for a minute i'm gonna i want you to pause the video and work this out now find the g triangle the g major pentatonic triangle all right so i'll assume you pause the video you would to do that you would find your g chord using the d shape just like we did with the e chord so it'd be up here there's the g note out of that triangle so that would be your base right and then there's the square so that's how that works so that's how you can easily find that e major pentatonic scale now i know some of you are going that's just one of the patterns there's patterns all over the neck don't worry about that don't get caught up this is a mistake so many people make and it's just confuses you what happens is you feel like i want to know all of it well the truth is you do actually know all of it just with that little shape there because there's only five notes in the pentatonic scale penta means five so you've got [Music] those five notes are it that's the pentatonic scale and when you learn these different patterns you're just learning those same five notes just in different positions so for now let's just focus on one and let's be as expressive as we can with that one shape [Music] you can do a lot with that okay so now we're going to get into bending strings and stuff in just a second but let's now connect the minor pentatonic scale also using a triangle and square for e and i'm going to show you two ways to do that the first way is let's take the tip of our e major pentatonic scale actually you could take any of the notes of it but we're going to go up this direction we're going to go three frets one two three so now that becomes the tip of the triangle there's the square that's the e minor pentatonic scale so listen to the difference hear the difference here how much sadder or bluesier it sounds compare them minor here's major so now just you know that going up three frets from any of these notes puts you into the triangle and square of the e minor pentatonic scale that's one way to think of it the other way is just to connect it to a different e chord so we're going to use the a chord shape in this case find the e note in that chord which is would be this note here so you can think of it that way and that would be the tip of your triangle that might be just a huge takeaway in and of itself you could walk away with that and know that if you're ever playing this chord shape you've got your minor pentatonic of that key right there within that shape that's just another little sidebar and i love these little lights that you can shine on things i mean i've been playing for years and sometimes i just noticed something like that and go wow okay that i wish i'd known that you know years ago but anyway so now you have your e major pentatonic and your e minor pentatonic using the triangle and the square so what do we do with all of that all right so now that you have that information let's talk about which notes you can bend from those shapes i always get this question and let me just go through this real briefly so if we're in that major pentatonic triangle um the the obvious one would be the seventh fret second string you do full bend and actually if you want a real country vibe bend up to that and then add your pinky on the seventh fret first string and you get that country kind of uh you know pedal steel kind of thing all right seventh fret second string fifth fret second string that one's a little harder to bend for for me this this fret board this is a seven and a quarter radiance radius so it's harder to bend but anyway that's what i've got fifth fret seventh fret on the second string when we get into the square you've got your seventh fret first string and obviously when you're bending that note you're coming up to this note which is in the square so hopefully that makes sense those same notes would apply in the minor pentatonic scale well not the notes themselves but within the shapes so you have that in this case would be the 10th fret second string eighth fret second string and then up into the box up here all right so one other little sidebar comment relating to bending once we get into that major pentatonic square if you're up here on that ninth fret first string you can do a half bend which gets you into that minor sound so if you want just you work in a little bit of bluesy you can bend it in that posit in that spot uh so there's some other spots in there but those are the kind of the main ones i think of when it comes to bending let's talk about this song now so you'll notice in that first measure i'm not playing anything and that's because this song is really set up as a call and response the the call would be the rhythm part so in the first measure you just hear the rhythm now i've got to respond to that that's that's a call let's respond and so i came in with that response now look at where i'm at i'm in the triangle now now this is all going to make sense now that you know where what our boundaries are middle finger goes up to the sixth fret third string and then the fifth fret second string so we have call and i just held that note for as long as i could and then it goes back to the call and that was all that's all i did for the response two notes very bb king kind of way of doing it instead of worrying about playing all over the place just express yourself with a very simple response it's a simple call simple response so the jam track goes back to the call and i'm going to play all this in context here in a minute but we go call and then i went there's the response again it's the triangle you can see it now sixth fret third string fifth fret seventh fret on the second back down and then we resolved on the fifth fret second string why do i keep coming back to that fifth fret second string think about that for a minute that note sounds really good that's because it's an e note right and we're going to talk about in a future lesson here that's coming up about how to learn all your note names if for those of you that don't know them but anyway so i keep resolving on that e i don't have to i couldn't i could resolve on any of these notes but it sounds best on that e that sort of brings you home okay let me play a slow version of the jam track so that you can hear these first two notes sort of when they come in so you can get your timing down and hear what it sounds like with the jam track one two three four all right so now the song goes back to the same call and this time my response was i did a series of bends there and sort of staggered them it's almost kind of a triplet effect one two three and what i'm doing is i'm playing on the seventh fret second string we're in the base of the triangle now notice i'm just doing a half bend here i should have mentioned this when i was going through the bends i said you could do a full bend and you can but if you do a half bin hear how it's got that kind of uh it's got the bluesy feel now why let's look at the note i'm bending too well that note is in the triangle of the minor pentatonic right oh okay so i'm bending it that's why it sounds more bluesy i'm bending into that minor pentatonic so that's why it's working we go back to that fifth fret second string land on that e note because it sounds so good alright so back to the call then my next response goes we again land on the fifth fret uh second string every time this time i slid up into the box so i went so i started on the fifth fret second string slid all the way up to the ninth fret second string seventh fret first string and then that's a pre-bend release that's where you do a bend without hitting it release it and then you come back to the to that final note there that e fifth fret second string now when i did that pre-bend it was another half bend it was not a full bend [Music] now this is where the song switches up and goes to the a part of it where we go into the the same kind of call but now it's over in a you know different kind of chord arrangement but it's the same premise we're now playing over the four quarter the a but i don't care about that i'm staying in the key of the song i'm staying in my triangle and square for all of it and that's a big takeaway for some of you some people get confused when it comes to playing lead you they you they think you have to play the chord changes so i would have to switch and now find a new no i can stay in the key of the song that's one thing that's nice about the pentatonix you can do that all right so before we move on to the next lick which is in the a part uh let me play along with the jam trick so that you can hear everything in context one two three four [Music] so so now the call is an a [Music] and what i did was i came right up into the minor pentatonic triangle so that would be where my middle finger the tip of the triangle is here on the ninth fret third string so we go nine and then we do eight and ten on the second string and then just do a bend down to the eighth fret and then land on that ninth fret third string classic blues 101 lick [Music] and i and i hung out on that note and let it ring as long as i could and then [Music] that's the next like i'm just i wanted to make all these licks just to show you the variety that you can come up with with these you know basic five notes here so that would be a ninth fret third string this is the next response by the way uh ninth third string tenth fret second string and then we go eighth fret second string ninth fret third string we go back to the eighth fret second hit that twice and then we resolve that lick on the ninth fret third string all together it goes really cool leg now i could use that down here as well but so let me play along with the a section of the song just so you can hear the collin response as we go into the a chord [Music] all right so this is where the song goes back to the e we go back to [Music] and i played that's the next response to the call there what am i doing i'm in that triangle again right hopefully you're getting some ideas here that it doesn't take a lot you can be very expressive with just a few notes and come up with different things it's how you hit the note how you apply the vibrato how you bend all of those things are very important and this allows you to focus on them so that's just holding down middle finger on the sixth fret third string ring finger or sorry index finger on the fifth fret second string and i'm just going thumb index finger some of you may be using a pick but either way it's three two three two and then i come up here to the seventh fret second string fifth fret second string sixth fret third string resolve on the e note there's the call again and then the next response goes now that time i landed on this note which is in the square right but you can hear i'm playing ahead i'm pulling us to the to the b chord right that's the five chord [Music] so i went and to play that fifth fret second string slide up to the ninth fret second string seventh fret first string a hammer on to the ninth fret and then we're resolving on that seventh fret first string now the song is over the b chord [Music] now the next lick i play after that goes and again that's the tr now we're into the minor pentatonic scale for e and remember we're playing over a b chord but i don't care i'm just staying in either the major or the minor and i like that it makes it easy so this next lick sliding up to the ninth fret third string we're gonna we're in the triangle now that should make sense because we've already done that we're going to walk back up 8th fret 10th fret and then two quick slides to the 12th fret second string and then i repeat that and then i went that time i went 12th fret second string 10th fret first string into that square and then the way that i resolve that like i went really cool very bluesy now why does that note sounds so good because that's the e note right it's the 12th fret first string it's that high e note but it's just the box and look at this i'm just walking down the box 12 10 12 on the second string we go down to the triangle do the bend and release and then that's where the song goes back [Music] into the call and i followed up by going to the major pentatonic scale [Music] same triangle and then the song just ends there it goes and i went to match that so that's that bend on the seventh fret second string play the note without the bend sixth fret third string and then the fifth fret second string that matches with [Music] now i didn't sit and map that out i just knew my little pattern there and i worked it out in real time and that's what's nice about playing out of shapes like this is i'm able to do that without having to you know sit in and get super analytical about it all right so let me back up i'll play through this with the jam track one more time we'll play through the entire thing so you have one final reference for this if you're not a premium member i would encourage you to look into it it's very affordable i put out lessons like this every friday and they're all designed to help you improvise and help you learn how to just express yourself and jam on the guitar that's what i i try and do different i try not to teach you how to play you know other cover songs there's plenty of people doing that this is more about how do you become a good guitar player and be able to jam with other people write your own music that's what they're all about alright so i'll see you next week for something new and premium members remember you also in this lesson you have access to the tablature and the slow walk-through video for that rhythm track as well one two three four [Music] so [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 1,241,482

Keywords: easy blues guitar, easy blues guitar lesson, simple blues lesson, simple guitar lesson, easy lead guitar lesson, lead blues guitar, blues guitar tutorial, beginner blues guitar, blues guitar teacher, online guitar lesson, online blues guitar, music education, blues tutorial, guitar education, guitar instruction, blues guitar instruction

Id: Hcb3R0_k8Vc

Length: 24min 23sec (1463 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020