Guitar For Life

If you want to be serious about improvisation in Blues Rock and Jazz, you will need to know some scales and how to relate them to the chords you are playing over.  Getting over the barrier to becoming confident in choosing the right scale and know where to find it on the guitar neck will give you knowledge for life.

The different modes of Major and Melodic Minor (among others) are your main target for Rock/Jazz and the Minor Pentatonic (with variation) together with some Major modes your target for Blues.

But instead of trying to overcome the enormous obstacle of learning every one of the scales from how they are built (i.e learn all 5 positions independently for all mode variations = some 35 for each scale with modes, not including whole tone and diminished scales, ending up around 100 different positions with “new” root notes, hew..), we are taking sort of a short-cut.

The focus will be to learn these base scales in every position on the guitar neck. Here they are…

The Minor Pentatonic: Great for Blues in both major and minor and we have some nice variations and superimposed variants with new exciting sounds.

The Major scale: Use for the so often heard of modes as Phrygian (dark an moody), Lydian (exciting, upfront) and Dorian (cool replacer for the boring minor/aeolian).

The Melodic Minor: A must if you want to play Jazz or Fusion.

The Harmonic Minorand Diminished will find their way into your playing to.

All modes will relate to these base scale. The iPhone application will show you what base scale to play and also in what root the base scale should be in. Look at the screen shots below. Here is an example where we want to play C Phrygian (OK, simple example, but this is to show how the app works). If you are a little be-read on music theory, you will likely know that Phrygian is the second mode of the Major scale and C Phrygian contains the same notes as Ab Major. So, in order to play C Phrygian (maybe over a low C tuned metal riff, very minor sounding), play Ab major with emphasis on C chord notes. This really means that you should not think about playing the Ab major scale, but thinking of playing the Ab major scale in a C context…

Swiping left/ right will show you other positions on the neck (look for the fret numbers under the fret board) and swiping up/down will change the root note. What major scale should you play if you want a F Phrygian? Swipe and find out…

Clicking in the fret board view will bring you to the info page. For each scale/mode I will try to explain the specific features and why/ how it sounds as it does as well as some ideas on how to apply the scales in real life.

The Minor Pentatonic have some more of less undocumented variations, or where some “out of scale” notes are added or used in a special way. For example, Freddy King and Robben Ford often uses the major 6 (6#) to create a jazzy, modern twist among some other “extra” notes. This variation has recently become one of my favorites in my own playing.

Remember, it takes long time to be confident in rapidly coming up with 1) the right scale to play over the chords and 2) what base scale should I play and in what key.

It is probably true that the really great players out there knows the positions and note contents of the most commonly used scales/chords, but they have been in the game for a long time.

This application is a help on the way…

Keep on practicing the scales (but focus on making music!)

Make sure to check out the FREE version before buying the FULL verison.

Mathias Navne

The screenshots are from the 1.7 version.

More screen shots are available in iTunes
POD


PAD