Extending Pentatonic Shapes

When looking at scale shapes in the past, I've found it difficult to link shapes together and move between them fluently, so I was keen to address this when revisiting the common 2nps pentatonic scale shapes.

It occured to me that using a variety of approaches to cover the same material would help reinforce the position of the notes without becoming disengaging, and would provide a more musical experience. I found the following useful in becoming familiar with the position of notes for a particular scale across a 'full' half of the fingerboard without my thinking becoming rooted inside these common box shapes:

Nb - clearly there are many permutations of all these exercises
-Only spending long enough on 2nps shapes to become vaguely familiar with them
-Converting 2nps shapes into 3nps shapes moving along the fingerboard
-Looking at 3nps shapes across the fingerboard introducing repeated notes

At the lower end of the fingerboard, these 3nps shapes can become tricky or sometimes unplayable using just the fretting hand. Where this was the case, I began to look at 1nps horizontal shapes across the fingerboard and using tapping to play these 3nps patterns as 2-note (fretting hand) + 1-note (tapped) ideas. When played in one position this gives a 'box' shape + a 'line' of notes, and when played moving along the neck allows you to cover a much greater area and use much wider intervals than would be possible using the fretting hand alone (for most people). This is cool because:

-Wider intervals sound less predictably pentatonic
-This idea encourages you to 'think' in two areas of the fretboard simultaneously, rather than just one
-Higher up the neck, you can also play wider intervals with the fretting hand

Another useful method of linking scale shapes together is by playing each horizontal pattern as 3-note chords (four groups of 3 across 6 strings). This helps to reinforce three notes at a time, rather than just one, and helps to give a more harmonic and rhythmic perspective to these pentatonic ideas. This 3-note chord shape idea can then be modified to incorporate notes from the previous or next 'line' shape (thus playing the chords within one of the original 2nps box shapes). This idea is demonstrated in Alex Machacek's DVD 'Pentatonic Concepts', which is providing something of a rough guide for my own exploration and something to check back to if I feel like I'm getting a little lost.

Pentatonic Scales

Unlike most guitarists, I've never really spent much time learning the common major and minor pentatonic scales. So I thought I'd better start. Even though I've not yet studied this area in depth, several things seem worth focussing on:

-the potential for creating musically exciting ideas based on a pentatonic scale beyond cliche blues licks, achieved through:
-->fluent linking of the common 2-note per string (NPS) shapes
-->creating 3nps patterns to help break out of the above
-->use of wider intervals and irregular rhythmic/accented groupings
-->use of all 3 pentatonic scales present within a key

-the explanation of more 'advanced' scales or modes through the idea of 'altered' or 'added to' pentatonic scales

Although initially building on the common 2nps patterns, I aim to keep this area of study as free from learning shapes as possible in a conscious effort to familiarise myself with and internalise note positions and intervals. As I think this area will provide the foundation for the explanation of many concepts considered to be more 'advanced' (and perhaps something of a 'safety net' for future improvisation), it is something I feel I should understand as fully as possible before considering more 'complex' (and sometimes academically favoured) approaches.

Triads as Building Blocks

14-04-09
Breaking down complex chords into more ‘manageable’ chunks.

This is a very simple concept which many musicians/guitarists will be familiar with, but some won’t be, or won't be used to thinking in this way. It seems pretty obvious, but then most things are once they’ve been explained to you. I use this for simplifying more complex or extended chords, but thinking-wise this concept assumes only that you know how to construct major and minor triads (if you’re not sure, there’s plenty of stuff on the internet).

This concept came about simply from exploring what would fit musically over one chord – in this case an Am7. What this turned into is a method I find really useful for breaking up more complex chords – seeing them as a stack of basic major or minor (or diminished) triads rather than a ‘big scary jazz chord’ with lots of extensions.

As daft as it seems, this approach didn’t occur to me until it was pointed out a couple of weeks back and I’ve been exploring it and having fun with it ever since – it’s an approach that really ‘clicks’ with me. I think it’s the way it helps the transition between a very simple idea and a more complex chord – I find it really gets ‘inside’ the ‘parent’ chord and gets me thinking in terms of scale tones, and also in terms of similarities between chords that might not seem to be closely related at all.

Edit 1 - the following are some points I drafted at the end of the above. For the sake of remaining concise, I've left them as bullets.

-If you’re working with just major and minor chords, you can now imply some new flavours or colours simply by adding the 7^th

-Clearly there are many voicings or inversions even for a triad, so there’s a lot of room for exploring this concept.

-You can bring out different flavours of complex chords without crazy hard-to-play shapes.

-You can now play major ideas over minor chords and vice-versa.

-If you’re getting into jazz, even sticking with 7^th chords you now have two ideas for each chord instead of one.

-Can be a useful way of achieving some ideas and separation if you have more than one guitarist to consider

-Setting out the notes of a key in this way is also useful because it effectively orders the notes in importance in relation to a chord – there’s more ‘space’ between notes now, and it looks less crowded than a scale à this sets out more of a useful order for the notes and how they relate to each other in the context of a chord.

Edit 2 - as yet I haven't figured out how to add diagrams to these blog posts. If anyone can help with this I'll gladly upload some scribblings to clarify my thoughts.

Four Note Chords

16-04-09

I first learnt to play seventh chords using chord diagrams, giving shapes with the roots on the 6th or 5th string. For the most part, I found these shapes contained more notes than I knew what to do with, and it took a while to become familiar with the order of the notes and their relation to the root. In some ways, this seems like an odd starting point to present students with, as these shapes invariably contain some notes that aren't 'necessary'.

Simply memorising (as opposed to 'learning') chord shapes means I wasn't actively engaging with the notes I was playing at all.

A useful way of breaking out of this, for me, is to instead concentrate on just four notes - once you have a four note chord built R 3 5 R it provides a handy framework within which to start shifting other notes about. Using four note shapes rooted on the 4th string provide some nice clear-sounding voicings that make it easy or 'logical' to see what you're doing as you start moving notes around - especially if you start with just a major or minor chord and then move through different chord types altering one note at a time.

I also like the idea of a four-note shape as being relatively 'compact' - you know it contains all the important bits, so you can kind of forget about it. If you can avoid barreing or muting the two strings not being played, then these are open to be used to add further extensions on higher strings or further up the fretboard, or in reverse you can start to think about selecting an interesting bass note to play underneath. This can lead to some interesting two-handed ideas, or allows more sonic space in which to construct parts for more than one guitarist.

I concede barre chords and 'bigger' shapes have their place, and some sound really great but it seems that there is an awful lot of emphasis, and perhaps a reliance, placed on these types of chords given that they a) are often not the most logical iterations of many chords, b) are not always the best sounding and c) often 'hog' quite a lot of the fretboard by playing a note on each string. These voicings also make no allowance for the part of the bass player. Whether you’re playing with one or not, it seems careless not to consider this when choosing a chord voicing – many 5 or 6 note voicings are simply doubling the same notes the bassist might choose an invading their sonic ‘space’.

Take Two

So, like many bloggers, I fell victim to the habit of not keeping my blog updated. So let's try again.

I think the problem I found with writing entries for a blog such as this, is that it can be difficult to break up concepts into smaller pieces without feeling like you're offering a set of thoughts that are half-baked or incomplete - even though it's necessary to study things in some sort of isolation for the sake of practicality. Thusly, I have several half-written entries - coming from a handful of sessions that ran into one another - that have escaped upload because I didn't feel like they were 'finished'.

Clearly this makes for a very empty blog, and does nothing to help clarify any understanding which may have been found when looking at the constituent parts initially. With this in mind, I shall aim to make future entries much shorter and more concise. This may result in entries that offer a more 'complete' description of a smaller piece of a concept, or just in a collection of thoughts which need further investigation.

The first task will be to go through those entries already written and to edit them into something more rounded that can be uploaded soon, and then more user and writer-friendly entries will follow. Watch this space...

Practicing and Developing Ideas

The subject of practicing has been something of a frustration for me for quite some time now. I often find that when asked to play something which involves applying a concept (previously discussed) to the guitar, I struggle, and nine times out of ten I’m not able to do it.

If you’ve ever failed miserably in front of, or said to a tutor that you “can’t do” something, you’ll probably know the look that most of them will give you – it’s sort of half disappointment, half disbelief, with a hint of superiority and a pinch of smugness – after which they’ll sigh and grudgingly go back to the beginning.

The assumption is that I clearly haven’t practiced the material – if you practice you’ll get it, and if you don’t get it, it’s clearly because you haven’t practiced. This assumption is, to my mind, complete rubbish and rather naive.

Seldom do people seem to think that maybe a student is putting the effort in, but is simply not using that time as effectively as he might, or doesn’t know how to practice. This is hardly surprising really, because no-one has ever told me how to practice. I’m not assuming that there’s a ‘proper’ way to practice, what I’m saying is that a lot of teachers seem to make no allowance for the method they initially present to a student not working for that individual. Thus, they don’t think to suggest different ways in which the same subject matter may be approached.

Finding the methods that work for me is the sole purpose of this collection of writings, and it’s very slowly coming together thanks to a few people who, instead of rolling their eyes, are happy to help me bounce ideas around and generally chat about ideas until something clicks – something for which I’m extremely grateful. I'd like to sincerely thank good friend and all-round guitar monster Nik Harrison, who always has something enlightening and inspiring to say, and is happy to share it. You can check out his work at:

http://guitargetpractice.blogspot.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/nikharrisonmusic

What I’d like to outline quickly is some ways in which an initial idea may be expanded upon, for use in practice with a view to building up an archive of ideas for playing in general, but in particular reference to improvisation (which I also find incredibly difficult).

I think these are probably guidelines which many of you other players will have internalised already, but as with many things I need to state them in order to keep them at the front of my mind. Where I’m at currently is trying to come up with a short phrase – maybe just three or four notes – over a static chord and then to make conscious decisions as to how I’m going to develop that particular idea.

I like to think of improvisation as assembling pre-conceived ideas on the fly – sort of like trying to build a house with Lego bricks but no instructions. Whereas in practice you can take all the time you like, improvisation demands that you assemble the house within a given framework – against a stopwatch if you like. It just occurs to me that Scrapheap Challenge would provide another (and in my case perhaps more suitable) analogy.

Clearly you have to actually come up with a phrase to begin with, but once you’ve done so, what options are there to expand upon and develop it? I think a useful way to do this is to break up the phrase into a couple of different ‘properties’ –

-notes

-order of notes

-rhythm

With longer phrases, it’s also worth considering the general ‘shape’ or ‘direction’ – that is to say whether the idea in general ascends or descends. Within the rhythm of the overall phrase, you can also look at changing the time value of each note. Just by identifying these simple attributes, you can start to experiment with the various permutations these give. For example:

-repeat the idea as it is

-repeat the idea up or down an octave

-repeat the idea up or down a different interval (within this you could change notes to keep the idea diatonic, or simply shift it by the interval and use the chromatic notes for a particular effect)

-keep notes and order the same, but alter the rhythm

-keep rhythm and order the same, but alter the notes

-keep notes and rhythm the same, but play the notes in a different order

-reverse the order (play the idea descending rather than ascending, and vice versa)

There are probably many more ways I haven’t thought of yet, but I think this provides a good basis for starting to get some ideas together – all these are options before you even begin to consider the various techniques you could use to play each phrase!!! I’m going to end this particular section now, or I think it will start to undo itself – the purpose was to outline a ‘way in’ to what I find a very daunting area of playing, where there are so many options it can be difficult to know where to start. The important point is to try as many things as possible, to remember the ones that sound good and don’t play the bad ones again.

Active Learning, Self-Awareness, Conscious Application

It's become very apparent to me lately that I've been taking very much a passive, rather than active, role in my own learning, particularly with regards to engaging with material when I practice.

I'm not just referring to working through patterns or exercises without thinking of the notes involved or the contexts to which they might be applied, but also on the much more basic (and fundamentally important) level of physically playing the guitar. This concept and it's application (or lack of) seems to me to epitomise the problem of things being taken as being 'obvious' - and just because we know something, we don't necessarily apply it as a conscious and consistent part of playing.

I recently took a guitar lesson where the first exercise was to play 10 individual notes, and after playing each one, to rate it from 1-10. It took me a good 10 minutes to grasp what I was being asked to do - play 10 notes, one at a time, anyway you like; loud, soft, dull, bright, muted, with vibrato, maybe bend it, the list goes on... What this exercise pertains to is the translation of what you intend to play, and how close this is to the actual sounds you make when you do play. I found this to be enlightening and scary in equal measure - my average was 8/10. This doesn't sound too bad until you consider we're talking about single notes played one at a time. What this means is that the average note I play on the guitar is only 80% as good as it could be. Scary.

This might seem like a very pedantic and overly-analytical way to look at playing an instrument, but think about it a bit more and it makes sense. Everything else - double stops, chords, flashy solo runs - are made up of single notes. If each note isn't as good as it could be, it stands to reason that neither are any of the above - neither is the rest of your playing, in fact.

I'm not suggesting that for each chord I play, I'm now starting to pick out each note and trying to 'hear' it individually - I don't think I could do that anyway. What it does force me to think about is applying this idea to my playing in a very active and 'aware' manner. Firstly, by consciously assigning a 'purpose' to a note/chord/progression before I play it and attempting to implement the rating exercise until it (hopefully) becomes second nature. Secondly, I'm starting to experiment with different chord voicings, and thinking in terms of what sounds good or appropriate in context versus what is physically convenient to play on the instrument. Clearly the 'best sounding' note or group of notes might not be playable in the time in which you have to play it/them, so you start thinking in terms of which parts of a piece you find most musically important, and to structure your playing around emphasising these parts.

That's taking things from a very basic to a very advanced level, and this whole concept is a life-long part of study rather than something to master in a few weeks or months, but without being aware of it and actively applying it to practice you're never going to be as good as you can be, which is surely the ultimate goal of any musician. It certainly is for me.

I suggest you try the exercise for yourself and you'll see what I mean. Once you've done it a few times - even as a warm-up when you practice - it'll start to become a constant state of mind, and I think you'll feel the benefit pretty quickly, as I am doing.

Combined with the thoughts that will follow this entry, this is now starting to form a much more informed way of playing for me, helping me to think about what I want to play and how I want to play it. I'm still a long way from being able to do this fluently (as improvisation, for instance) but I finally feel I'm taking a few tentative steps in the right direction.

To paraphrase Jerry Donahue; starting to become more of a ‘guitar thinker’ than a ‘guitar player’.

Too Obvious?

Having already begun to think about and write down some things I'd like to cover in this blog, I can't help but notice that I seem to be using the phrase 'this might seem obvious but...' an awful lot.

The problem with the 'obvious' is that it's often assumed and therefore seldom stated. This seems to be a particular problem when discussing ideas that are seen to be relatively 'basic', or when the person teaching a concept has become so familiar with it that they can't remember what it's like to find that concept completely alien.

It's highly likely, then, that I'll end up repeating a lot of things ad nauseum. Firstly, I'd like you to consider whether you are quite as familiar with the concept in question as you think you are. Whether the answer is 'yes' or 'no', I'd ask you to read it anyway and see if you get anything from the way I'm thinking about it, or to see if you can suggest anything which may help myself or others to get more from it. If the answer is still 'no', then my apologies.

I'd rather overstate something and look slightly daft for it than to assume a person is already familiar with it or finds it clear first time round and thus render the concept completely unreachable for them. I've been there and it's not cool. The main purpose of repeating it is that I have to do this myself to drill it into my own head, and for the most part it takes an awful lot of drilling. Hopefully this will help to make the approach or application I'm thinking about clear - if the content I'm trying to apply is new to you then there are tonnes of lessons you can find through Google that will probably explain things better than I could, and may provide you with a perspective which you find more useful than mine anyway.

Welcome to My Head

As this is the first post in my first web-log, it seems like a good place to say 'Hello' and to provide an outline of the purpose behind the entries that will follow.

I say 'entries' rather than 'articles' because what I intend is to use this space as a jotter or notebook in which to scribble my thoughts as I explore various musical concepts and ideas, rather than as somewhere to post complete and structured pieces.

Though I have been a student of music, and specifically the guitar, for 5 or 6 years, I cannot claim to have progressed as far as this time frame might suggest. Lately I have found myself revisiting what could be considered some very 'basic' ideas in order to aid the understanding and application of more 'complex' ones. Far from being tedious, I have found this to be (and continues to be) enlightening, specifically where an old concept has been presented to me in a new or different way, and one which resonates with me and gives me ideas. In many cases what has been relatively blurred for long periods of time has been cleared up almost instantly. This is very refreshing and exciting for me, but also frustrating that I could have gained a much better understanding of a concept much earlier were it presented differently. I hope this will save at least one person a lot of headscratching, time, and feeling at a dead-end musically.

It is, therefore, the manner in which ideas are presented as much as the ideas themselves on which I would like to focus. I find there is no shortage of material in tuition books or magazines, but that the variety of content is seldom matched by variety in ways of interpretting it. This may sound obvious (indeed, a magazine article couldn't possibly present an idea in five different ways) but I also find it very frustrating. I personally gain much more from the active discussion of ideas with other musicians than from years of reading textbooks or following tuition method books (though these have their place also).

What I hope these scribblings will provide is food for thought and fuel for discussion. Any ideas I might outline are in no way intended to be 'final' or anywhere near 'complete' and I certainly wouldn't claim to be 'giving someone a lesson'. I expect to learn just as much as, probably more than, those who feel they would like to read, comment on and contribute to these ideas.

The content will doubtless start with very simple ideas, but afterall, these are the foundations of more complex ones. If you find something confusing, unclear or plain wrong then please say so. Likewise if you find something of use. The best outcome is if someone can suggest and extension to, improvement upon, or alternative approach which will open even more doors, both for myself and others!

It's unlikely anything will be covered that hasn't been before, but I thought it may be interesting to document the process of my learning a concept as it is fresh and evolving, rather than once the information has been fully absorbed and 'solidified' within my understanding (if a concept is ever fully 'understood').

I hope that what I've written sounds not pretentious, but clear and makes some kind of sense. I hope you will feel free to contribute and that we can provide some really helpful ideas for anyone who finds themself stuck in a rut musically.