Today I’m going to tell you about the great cornerstone of rock and roll and blues. You ask yourself, how is it possible? The most important secret to playing guitar like super man and your key to begin your road to giant douchebagdom, and its all free, on your favorite blog ever.
The cornerstone to faking like you are super awesome at playing guitar is called the ‘pentatonic scale’. Now you might say to yourself at this point “scale? I can’t learn one of those. It sounds super complicated! I’d better pay someone to teach me this.” Well, keep those Andrew Jacksons, because it is comprised of 5 simple notes. Believe me, once you get this down, you will be jamming with Hootie and the rest of Counting Crows, or whatever.
This scale goes like this if you’re in the key of E, which is the working man’s key. Now remember that, because you’ll play a lot of songs in the key of E and you’re going to want to inform people that its the working man’s key. It makes you look super smart and cultured even though you’re poor and grew up in Draper, Utah, and you’ll gain some clout around your young liberally minded friends (or soon to be friends once you blow their socks off).
Pentatonic Scale (minor)
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—————————–
——————7—-9—- seventh, tonic
——5—7—9————- minor third, fourth, fifth
–7————————– tonic
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If you are counting the notes and thinking that there are six notes, well, the first and last notes are the same note, the root, or “tonic.” Think of this scale as sort of a skeleton to all of the cool pseudo-sophisticated scales you’ll be playing pretty soon. You will be adding notes in between these notes to spice it up and give it character, but for now just master these simple five notes.
Improv.
With these five notes you can already begin jamming to your favorite blues or rock. Try them out in as many different variations and rhythms as you can think of. The important thing as you start to improvise is to end all of your musical thoughts and phrases on the right resolution note. Beginners will want to always end a musical phrase on either the tonic or the fifth. You’ll have to just listen to what your jamming to and you’ll build up an intuition. Once you start getting good at that, you can start experimenting with ending on the minor third or on the seventh. Jimi Hendrix did it a lot, and its super funky and sophisticated in sort of an unclassically trained sort of way. You’ll pretty much never end a musical phrase or thought on the fourth.
Note: the majority of all funk songs have a bass line based on this scale.
First Add-on
Just so you don’t get bored with this pentatonic scale, I’ll give you probably the most commonly used add-on. Its a note that will make this pentatonic scale into a simple blues scale. It might be simple, but it pretty much encapsulates like 70% of all blues and rock and roll. The note is a half-note above the fourth in the pentatonic scale. So, here’s the same pentatonic scale with the add-in.
——————————
——————————
———————–7—9–
——5—7—8—9———–
–7—————————
One sound that is often exploited is bending the fourth note up into that half step.
All of this is considered a minor scale, but in rock and blues it can still be pulled off while jamming to a major key. It makes for an interesting juxtaposed sound which is sort of bad-assesque.
For starters you can try this scale while jamming to these chords:
E, A, B7
