Hidden Scales (or the Last Guitar Column You Need to Read*)

*Not really

As I age, I tend to get lazier as a guitar player. I like to rely on patterns. A lot. This laziness isn’t completely unwarranted. I mean I do love everything about guitars. Playing them. Hearing them. Looking at them – guitarcenter.com is like a girlie mag for my old age. However, I realized long ago that I would never be a hotshot guitar player no matter how much all the guitar mags want me to think I can be. And as I got older, I realized that putting a great deal of effort into memorizing tons of different shapes no longer holds appeal for me. Then one day, while procrastinating working, I was reading a guitar thread where a user briefly mentioned how major keys can be made up of other scales found within that particular set of notes.

Intrigued, I started thinking about it.

I thought about it a lot. Heck, I even made an excel spreadsheet as a visual aid.

Excel spreadsheet, you say. Wow it must be serious. Show me a PowerPoint presentation.

Hey let’s not get carried away for gosh sakes, it’s only guitar stuff.

What if I told you I discovered the Ark, the Fountain of Youth, and the Holy Grail of guitar playing? And, unbelievably, it was based on the one scale pattern most guitar players probably already know? At first I seriously doubted my hypothesis, because I really thought this concept was much too easy an explanation to actually be worth anything musically. Like it was such an obvious answer to navigating the fretboard that there was no possible way it would actually work. I don’t recall ever reading about this idea in the guitar magazines or music theory books I have read. It was like Cold Fusion and just didn’t seem like it should be workable. But the idea was intriguing and kept pulling me back. Like the movie Inception but with strings and tuners. I had to investigate to see if I was onto something or if this was just some tinfoil-hatted theory. So I started doing the (sigh) work and made the aforementioned chart found below.

Let’s get to it.

This idea hinges on the fact that you already know the difference between major and minor pentatonic scales and how both can be played using the same pattern, but starting on different frets. In this situation, the same pentatonic shape can work as both major and minor depending on which note is considered the root. Root on the index finger – the scale is minor. Root on the pinky – the scale is major. For example A-Minor pentatonic starts on the 5^th fret of the low E string. If you take this pattern and move it three frets toward the headstock you are in A-Major. How’s that for versatility? I like to use a couple different pentatonic patterns, but that’s the nice thing about guitars. Scale shapes like this are easily movable and adaptable based on your level of fretboard knowledge. For our purposes remember, minor scales are considered the same as their relative major scales.

Now for the chart. Listen carefully.

The top row lists the all of the triads that make up the harmonized C-Major scale (I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, vii°), but you can move this to any major scale. In the columns below the triad names, I have listed the corresponding major/minor pentatonic scale that will work over that chord when played within the context of a chord progression. Then, depending on whether the chord is major or minor, you can use those scales that correspond with the root of the chord. If the chord is major, use the major pentatonic. If it is minor, use the minor pentatonic. Say you are in the key of C-Major. If the chord sequence is using a ii (D min) chord, you can use the D-minor pentatonic scale over that chord. The corresponding scales are comprised of notes found in the major scale used in the main composition. I have color-coded the columns so you can see that none of the notes in the various pentatonic scales are outside of the notes within the “parent” scale of C-major. Interestingly, this approach is almost like being able to understand the modes, (you know – Oneian, Twoian, Threegian, Fourdian, Fivolydian, Sixolian, Loyoucrazian), without actually having to understand the modes.

Now, understandably, this may be a little simplistic for an advanced player. However, for a beginner, or for a non-hotshot guitarist like myself, it is a pretty easy way to grasp the concept of playing to the chord changes rather than staying in the same position throughout an entire progression. Additionally it will help with fretboard fluidity and fluency. The nice thing about this approach for the learning guitarist is that it doesn’t require memorizing a ton of different shapes. Knowing one or two pentatonic shapes and how they can be moved from major to minor is all it requires and should give you a pretty good start to moving around the neck while learning to stay in key over the changes. Give it a try.

chart

Professor P.
-World’s okayest, self-taughtiest, basement-leveliest guitar player.

My Theory of Relativity (or E-Minor = G-Major)

Some things are just meant to go together: Yin and Yang, peanut butter and chocolate, bacon and everything. Separately and individually these components are perfectly fine, but when mixed together they become sort of remarkable. The blend highlights characteristics of each that otherwise might be overlooked.

But as an aspiring gourmand, it isn’t always easy to identify exactly what those subtle flavors are, much less how or why certain ingredients go together. One has to educate the palate in order to appreciate the nuances. In other words, it takes time and practice to fully appreciate the full flavor profile, rather than simply stuffing your face to satisfy the primal feeling of hunger.

As a novice guitarist, memorizing the major and the minor scale shapes took about all of the mental bandwidth I had available. Just getting the motions under my fingers took most of my concentration, so I didn’t really have the added mental capacity to further analyze what I was doing from a musical perspective. As a slacker, it’s easy to fall into this pattern, especially on an instrument like guitar when there is so much to learn, like power chords and making cool faces, bro. Duh! Sticking with the food metaphor, I was more worried about easing my hunger (learning the shapes) than I was about how it tasted, or in this case how it sounded.

Eventually a teacher told me that a natural minor scale has the same notes as the parent major scale, but with a different tonal center. Beyond learning the definition to regurgitate on the exam, I never really gave much thought to relative keys when making my own music, and I continued to practice both major and minor scales on the guitar without fully understanding how they can and do complement each other. For example, the E-minor scale is the relative minor of the G-major scale, but starts on a different note: E, which is the sixth degree of the G-major scale. Fundamentally the two scales share the same notes, but the fingering patterns found within each scale shape lend themselves to different musical licks and melodic phrases.

One day, while reading some pop-physics book, I was contemplating Relativity and for some reason the mostly forgotten concept of the relative minor scale was jarred loose from the sediment and started rattling around in my head:

“Hmmm,” I thought. “‘Relative’ means two things are connected.” (Rattle).
“The major scale is connected to its relative minor.” (Rattle, rattle)
“Ah Ha. Same tasty notes, different chewy center.” (Rattle, rattle)

Then a lightbulb went on as I began to wonder what would happen if I played a relative minor scale over a major chord progression. “I bet it’ll be like how a good beer can bring out the flavor of a decent cheeseburger.”

Musically speaking, a mixture of lines from the major scale mixed with lines from the relative minor scale can sound really good when intertwined and overlapped with each other in the context of a major chord progression. It’s like adding salt to bland French fries or sugar to sour strawberries. It enhances what is there without completely changing the deliciousness.

Try this recipe out and see for yourself:

Take a basic progression in G-major: G, C, D (or I, IV, V), and play the G-major pentatonic scale: G-A-B-D-E-G over that.
Then take the same progression and play E-minor pentatonic: E-G-A-B-D-E over it.
Use the same progression again, but this time alternate playing G-major and E-minor throughout.

The major and minor approaches sound OK, right? Notice what happens when you alternate licks from each pattern. Once you get the hang of it, you should start to notice that — in much the same way a wine brings out the best flavors in a steak — blending relative scales like this brings a new level of sophistication and nuance to your playing and hopefully this will inspire you to find other connections as well.

Just remember:

Take your time.

Let it breathe.

Savor the flavor.

Bon appetit.

Goin’ Round Again

For those who are familiar with Battlestar Galactica 2003 “re-imagining” this lesson may tread on familiar ground, er space. For those of you who are not familiar, jump on Whateverflix, or whichever service is your preferred purveyor of sci fi awesomeness and watch it now. Go ahead. I’ll wait. It is that good. One of the themes of that show is (if you haven’t watched it by now, you aren’t going to so I don’t care about spoilers) all things repeat. There is a circular nature to the universe inhabited by those characters. This cyclical property of the BSG universe was illustrated in the fact that history would eventually repeat itself, as well as in the fact that there were multiple copies of the same person (can never have too much #6) in the form of the antagonists.

Or to put it another way.

Oh no, here it comes again
Can’t remember when we came so close to love before
Hold on, good things never last
Nothing’s in the past, it always seems to come again
Again and again and again ooh again oh

Black Sabbath
Neon Knights
Sung by the late, great, Ronnie James Dio

Science fiction philosophizing aside, a similar symmetry can be found when it comes to finding notes on the guitar. After I had been playing a few years, it was pretty easy for me to find notes that were an octave apart on the Low E, A, D, and G strings. Finding notes is no big deal on the guitar, right? Then a DaM* exploded in my head about 5 years ago when I was watching an episode of the PBS show “The Piano Guy”. He was talking to the camera about something while simultaneously performing these seemingly complex (they seemed complex to me at least) runs up and down the piano keyboard. He then explained how he was performing those runs. He was just playing the same sequence of notes over and over, BUT he was moving the starting points up or down to different octaves. In other words he was just repeating himself over and over. Sometimes it would be a sequence of 5 notes. Other times it was 3 notes. It was all very casual and nonchalant and after he explained what he was doing, the idea clicked inside my head and I was like DaMmmmmmm. I realized I could apply this repetitive technique to the scales on the guitar.

What do I mean?

To illustrate this point let’s keep this sweet and easy and take a look at the first three notes of the major scale as I like to play it on the guitar. Here are the instructions:

Part A.

Step 1. Play any note on the 6th (Low E) string.

Step 2. Move two frets up toward the body and play the corresponding note.

Step 3. See Step 2.

Congratulations, you’ve just played the first 3 notes in a Major scale. Play these notes over and over. Let your fingers get used to the stretches while your arm gets used to moving up and down. Change the note order, play around with the duration of the note. JAM DaMmit. Own those notes.

Now let’s take a look at where those notes repeat an octave higher.

Part B same as the first.

Step 4. Skip the 5th string (A). Fret the notes on the 4th string (D), but don’t start at the same fret you did on the Low E. Start 2 frets closer to the body. This note, and the note you played in Step 1 above, are, get this, the SAME NOTE. That’s right, these two notes in question are one octave apart. The same note, but on two different places on the fretboard.

Step 5. Move two frets up toward the body and play the corresponding note.

Step 6. See Step 5.

This diagram may help you visualize this. The green dots in the diagram show the fingering positions on the Low E string. The red dots show the fingering positions exactly one octave higher on the D string. Play around with these notes. Improvise. Then play the same lick an octave higher or lower. Trust your ears.

This method can be applied anywhere there are repeating notes on the fretboard. If you are already familiar with the different ways to find octaves, you can apply this trick to just about any spot on the neck. It also applies to most other scale shapes. I found using this repeating note technique is a good way to get around the fretboard and leads to a whole bunch of worthwhile exporation, allowing you to eventually get faster at finding notes up and down the neck.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

-Prof. P.

*Dumbass Moment – See previous post for further explanation.