Playing acoustic fingerstyle ragtime / blues guitar is probably the most rewarding of all guitar styles I have ever learned to play. The fullness of sounding like two guitars playing together is something that’s hard to beat.

If you have ever wanted to learn this style but never gotten around to it because it just sounds too difficult – then you are missing out for the wrong reasons. Ragtime and blues fingerstyle is mostly not as hard to play as it sounds. Sure, some of it can be difficult, but generally the basics are actually quite easy … and still sound just as impressive. A lot of the sound of fingerstyle blues (especially ragtime) can be something of an aural illusion – there’s not as much going on as your ears would have you believe. So what’s the best way to get started?

The best way to learn this style is to just jump straight in and learn some songs. Although this it not something for the complete beginner, if you are at an intermediate stage of guitar playing then you should be more than capable of playing acoustic ragtime blues. As long as you can comfortably play common chord shapes and rhythms reasonably well then that should be all you need, along of course with the desire to learn and practice.

When I first got into ragtime blues finger picking, there wasn’t much available in terms of videos showing you this stuff. I learned by listening along with a few tabs from books. The biggest challenge I had with this was (apart from being slower than learning from video) where to put your fingers on the fretting hand. It wasn’t always apparent whether you should be holding a normal chord shape or doing something else. TABs rarely give this kind of information. I’d get there in the end but it took a while, I’d often find myself putting the book down and coming back to it another time, only to find out the left hand was much easier than I first thought. It was probably a year later that I realised I was working my fretting hand twice as hard as I needed to. What I would have done for video lessons back then!

Okay, so this is supposed to be a review of Jim Bruce’s Ragtime Blues Lessons – From Texas to the Delta, I suppose I ought to get to it! I’m always on the lookout for new guitar teaching material (a disease that all guitarists surely understand!) and I stumbled across Jim’s course by pure chance. The thing that caught my attention was it looked like a genuine quality guitar course. This is something you rarely find when stumbling across the usual overpriced downloadable stuff for guitar, something of which there is no shortage of unfortunately, but I’ll get to that in another rant someday! For now, let’s just say Jim’s Fingerstyle Blues course is probably the first I have come across that pleasantly doesn’t fit this bill. For once, in the world of online guitar tutorials, you are actually getting what you pay for … nice one Jim!

So what do you get?

The course consists of 23 downloadable videos (wmv format), each one showing a complete fingerstyle song broken up and slowed down into sections showing right and left hand close ups. Jim also explains how each song is played along with tips where necessary. Each video is accompanied by a separate printable pdf TAB as well as the chord shapes and each tab section being displayed on screen in the video.

The songs taught vary from artists such as Robert Johnson to Blind Blake covering standard tunings, open G bottleneck and open D. Click here for a full list. There’s enough variety to cover the various blues picking styles ranging from the bouncy ragtime feel of Blind Blake to the more conventional blues style of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Floyd Council.

If you want to learn how to play fingerstyle blues then there is no better way than jumping straight in and learning some songs. This is one of those styles where you will do better with hands on learning rather than the conventional route of learning basic fingerpicking patterns and exercises, which while useful, don’t really show you much in the way of piecing them together. Once you have a few songs under your belt you’ll find you can break down some common licks and patterns that work well in other songs. This is great for adding variety and improvising blues fingerstyle.

Overall, Jim’s course is one of the best value downloadable guitar learning products I have ever come across. Not only do you get many hours worth of videos showing you how to play all of the songs but, most importantly you get high quality guitar tuition for a style that’s not in abundance. Most other download products are simply rehashed content priced at three times their worth.

Jim’s lessons are straight up what they say on the tin … no magic, no secret formulas that the pros don’t want you to know (Grrrr!), just plain straight talking “how to play fingerstyle blues guitar”. In short, it’s all you need. Be warned though, you will need broadband to download the videos which weigh in at about 200 to 300mb each, and there’s 23 of them!

Guarantee.

Jim offers a no questions asked money back guarantee if you aren’t happy with his product, personally I doubt he gets many unsatisfied customers. As sales are handled through Clickbank you can rest assured your transaction and guarantee is safe and secure.

If you are ready to take on fingerstyle blues guitar then Jim’s course is going to be hard to beat and I’m more than happy to recommend it.

Click here to purchase or find out more about Jim Bruce’s Blues Guitar Picking Course.

1. The pentatonic formula – 1 b3 4 5 b7

2. The Pentatonic Box Pattern (Ok, I lied about locking away the five positions, we’ll be needing just this one)

   

3. Jam Track in A Minor

4. The ‘A’ Root Notes

   

5. A few easy scale patterns

   

Okay, enough of the holiday metaphors, what is this all about and how will it propel your pentatonic scale playing?

Well firstly this idea is much easier to work with than the common five pentatonic positions. The few easy patterns above still cover virtually the entire fretboard once they are pieced together and can be put to musical use easier than the traditional five position method. Secondly and most importantly, it will almost force you into letting the scale dictate the pattern rather than allow the patterns to dictate the scale – probably the biggest difference between guitarists stuck in the pentatonic box and those having total control of the scale across the entire fretboard.

This isn’t any kind of groundbreaking new method nor is it a replacement for other methods, just a kick in the right direction to help you see scale patterns and positions for what they are … the notes belonging to a five note pentatonic scale and not a set of fixed ‘patterns of the moment’.

Like everything else it’s up to you to put it to practice. I’m going to give you a few ideas to get going but it’s your job to do the thinking and piece it all together, do this and I guarantee you’ll start to realise that using the whole fretboard isn’t really that difficult.

Learning The Notes

Guitarists with great command of scales and the fretboard know a few things. Things that take a lot of hard work and time to master. Among these are all of the notes on the fretboard, the CAGED chords and other chord types, chord and scale notes and intervals, music theory knowledge and the structural and theoretical relationship between all of these things.

The more of this you know the better but you can’t learn it all overnight, it can take years. Right now it doesn’t matter but one thing there is absolutely no substitute for is knowing the notes on the fretboard. If you can’t find them quickly then moving forward and getting out of the rut is going to be impossible without resorting to memorised patterns, scale runs and counting frets from a fixed point of reference – analogous to having a piece of elastic tied between your fingers and the pentatonic box, the further away you stray from it the harder it gets and you are constantly being pulled back to it.

The good news is learning the notes isn’t as hard as you might think. Practicing all of this in one key only is the best way to quickly learn the notes. We are only using the ‘A’ notes as our reference for every pattern and as there’s only one on each string between every twelve frets, you can get used to these confidently in just a few days. Master this technique in just one key and you should find everything suddenly making a whole lot more sense as you see how the scale ties together across the fretboard. After this it’s just a matter of practicing in the other keys to learn the other notes. Enough banter, time to start practicing!

Exercise 1.

Take the first octave of the pentatonic box and move it around the neck to start on the ‘A’ note of each string. Remember the scale sequence is 1 b3 4 5 b7. Even though the pattern itself changes on some strings, get used to the fact the note order is the same, it’s only the string tuning that changes the actual shape of the pattern, the scale sequence doesn’t alter.

Play along with the jam track and get used to jumping randomly between these patterns. A few days and you should be able to do it fluently without pausing.

Exercise 2

The first exercise dealt with single octave pentatonic patterns ascending from the root. Now do the same thing again but this time use the highest four notes of the pentatonic box and jam along randomly moving between the strings. Like before, remember it’s the same sequence of notes even though the pattern changes slightly, this time only in one place.

Exercise 3

For this final exercise we are using a simple Amin7 arpeggio pattern in just three positions starting on the sixth, fifth and third strings. This keeps things simple and still manages to cover a large amount of the neck when combined with the patterns from the previous exercises. Note that a minor seventh arpeggio is only one note short of the full pentatonic scale. If used sparingly this works well with the pentatonic scale while at the same time can help get you out of the habit of stepping through scale patterns in predictable sequences. Like before, fire up a jam track and spend some time randomly jumping between these patterns until you can find and play them fluently.

That pretty much sums it up. Play around with all three exercises everyday until you are comfortable with them and can jump to every ‘A’ note without hesitating, combine them and mix them up randomly. Learn the scale intervals in each pattern even if they don’t help you right now, they certainly will later. Get used to sliding and moving between the patterns, it won’t take long before you can seamlessly join them all into one large scale up and down the neck. If you practice this everyday you’ll have come a long way in just a month or so. By this time you will find learning the notes on the fretboard for every key get’s easier and quicker, find jam tracks for various keys and play about with the same ideas for all of them. After a while you should be adding your own ideas and discovering new ways to play about with the pentatonic scale. The five common positions will suddenly become easy as you see how these smaller patterns overlap and integrate with them. The diagrams below give you an idea of this, study them and work the five patterns back into your practice routine.

The single octave patterns from exercise one

The four note patterns from exercise two

Minor seventh arpeggios from exercise three

All of the above combined and including the full pentatonic box position 1. As you can see, virtually all of the notes have been covered.

Now go practice!

When I write new lessons I kind of interact with them while I’m writing, to get ideas and quite often I get caught up in the moment, ending up spending more time with the guitar in my hands instead of writing the lesson. Nothing wrong with that, it’s what playing guitar is all about but today something got me thinking about where a lot of guitarists go wrong and it reminds me of something that I read on Justin’s guitar site (excellent guitar resource) about transcribing. He’s really passionate about trying to convince you to stop relying on TABs and start listening, work things out for yourself, something which I couldn’t agree more.

If you’ve read more than a few of my lessons then you’ll know by now that I’m very passionate about convincing you to stop looking for quick fixes and realise that the boring stuff (which is only as boring as you make it) is where it’s all at. Why am I reminded of this? Because today while I was working on the new lesson, I sidetracked and ended up playing the minor pentatonic scale on one string with only one finger and I didn’t stop for about an hour doing just that and only that. Now the thing is, and this is really important, I’m not new to doing these kind of exercises, I’ve done similar things a thousand times for thousands of hours, I know them inside out but I’m never going to stop benefiting from them. Not ever! What’s more, even after this amount of years I’m still not bored with any of it and I still gain experience every time I do it.

This is what it takes to play guitar. You are never too good to practice stuff that on the surface seems so simple that you can skip to something more difficult or exciting. Many of my readers are guitarists that are stuck in the rut. If this is you then please take notice of what I have said here. It’s probably the most important piece of advice that will get you out of the guitar rut. What do I have to do to convince you?

There seems to be a lot of confusion about arpeggios for those who have never played around with them. Many beginners assume that an arpeggio is played by holding a chord shape and picking the notes separately instead of strumming. Now that certainly is an arpeggio but it’s not the only way to play one and in the case of playing lead guitar the arpeggio is played more like you would play a scale. The only difference between a chord and an arpeggio is that the chord plays the chord tones simultaneously while an arpeggio plays them sequentially. The A minor chord consists of the notes A, C and E and you can play these notes any how you like, as long as they are not picked simultaneously, they can be played in any order for any note length, staccato or legato it doesn’t matter as long as you are making any phrase by picking one note at a time then you will be playing an A minor arpeggio.

The TABS and diagrams below show a few different ways you could play with arpeggios.

Hold down a bar chord and individually pick each note up and then back down again. Practice this by letting all the notes ring out by keeping fingers pressed down and then practice lifting the hand slightly after each note is picked so as to mute the strings, keep the fingers pressed only for the duration of the note.

Similar to the above but playing note sequences

Extension of the same idea, this can be played a bit more like you would pick notes of a scale pattern rather than holding down a chord shape.

Arpeggio using just the three notes in one octave

Three notes on just two strings played as a lick

Arpeggios like this are often played at high speed using sweeping techniques but they don’t have to be, you can play them at slower speeds. What’s important is that you play it more like a scale, in other words lift each finger to mute each note after it has been picked so that it doesn’t ring over the next note

Playing a minor arpeggio will result in a sound that maintains the characteristics of the minor chord which is quite obvious as you are just playing the chord tones. If you were to play an A minor arpeggio as a phrase or lick over an A minor chord then it is always going to sound like it fits, however a lot of blues and rock music will have a solo that is tonally dominated by the minor pentatonic scale throughout the solo. With this in mind consider that the min7 arpeggio is actually the same thing as a minor pentatonic scale but with one note missing. The notes in A minor pentatonic are A, C, D, E, G and the notes in an Amin7 chord are A, C, E, G…. A lot of solos based on the minor pentatonic scale will have a minor flavour to them over the entire chord progression even though the minor chord itself might not be present in the progression, this is because the minor pentatonic scale is used so often for soloing that we have kind of got used to the sound it creates. The minor pentatonic scale itself could actually be considered an Amin7add11 arpeggio because that’s the chord you get if you add a D to an Amin7 chord.

Playing an Amin or Amin7 arpeggio will sometimes work anywhere over chord progression that would normally use an A minor pentatonic for a solo but there are also times that doing this will clash over certain chord changes so you’ll need to let your ear be the judge, you will only find these things out by experimenting. Getting used to arpeggios can lead to some great ideas and really help you get better acquainted with the neck. They are also good for helping you get away from running sequentially up and down scale patterns by injecting some larger intervals into your playing. The next few diagrams show some Amin7 patterns that you should get familiar with but also spend some time to see how many you can find yourself.

All the notes belonging to Am7

One of the biggest problems with scale positions is if you’re not careful you might end up thinking about them in positions relative to each other, rather than independent scales. Whatever method you use, one thing that is very important is you always know where you are playing on the neck at any given moment. For example if you are playing position three and you only got there by counting up five frets from position one then this is a habit you need to get out of. If you happen to be playing A minor pentatonic in position three starting on the tenth fret then you should also be aware of where the root notes are within that shape as well as triads or any of the common chord shapes inside or within close proximity to it. Knowing these kind of target tones is the key to making your solos sound musical.

Position 3 A minor pentatonic starting on tenth fret

Root notes inside and within close proximity of the scale pattern

A minor triad inside the scale pattern

Some of the D minor (red) and A minor (green) form chords cross over into position 3

The above diagrams give you the idea, the main point is to always be looking for and knowing what’s around your fingers. There is nothing wrong with knowing and using the scale patterns themselves but thinking more about what is contained within and around them is very important if you want control of the neck. Obviously the same applies to all five positions.

Getting around the B string tuning.

This is an idea that takes a little getting used to but once you’re familiar with it, it can be a very powerful method for working your way around the neck and it outlines another importance of knowing all the notes on the fretboard. I’ll describe this all in the key of A using the minor pentatonic scale but the same method can be applied to any scale type. Breaking scale patterns into small chunks and moving them around is a great way to get familiar with a scale across the entire neck and get you away from thinking of scales as being full six string box patterns only.

We already know that the minor pentatonic scale contains only five notes so it’s quite obvious that all the shapes and positions are nothing more than repeats of the same five note sequences. This next idea thinks more in terms of small patterns repeated throughout the neck. The only thing that complicates it is the string tuning offset at the B string so first lets consider for a moment that all the strings on the guitar are tuned evenly.

In standard guitar tuning each string is tuned five semitones (half steps) apart, other than the interval between the G and B string.

All string intervals are five semitones except between the G to B string

If we now tuned the strings so that they are evenly tuned five semitones apart then a few things would change because the B and adjacent E string would need to be tuned up by one semitone (the B to E string interval is already tuned five frets apart so if the B string goes up then the adjacent E string will also have to go up with it). What we would end up with is a tuning that goes E A D G C F and any chord or pattern that we already know would have to change. Therefore the standard box pattern minor pentatonic would need to drop down by one fret on the B and E string to compensate.

Standard box pattern in standard tuning and what it would look like if all strings were tuned evenly spaced five semitones apart.

This is where the A notes would end up

It would now become a very easy task to take the first octave of the standard minor pentatonic shape and move it to start on any one of the root notes without needing to change the shape.

Obviously when we get down to the B string we start to run out of strings, we still keep the same pattern but we only use the first four notes of it. Likewise we could start it on the highest string and only need the first two notes.

Lets now take this one step further and think about how a pattern can move in four directions from any root note. It can move to or from the right or left ascending or descending like this.

This means that we can learn just two small patterns and as long as we know where the root note is we can move from that note either up or down to the left or right. Even though this is four directions it’s only necessary to know two small patterns.

For example this one octave pattern can start from the lowest note and ascend up the octave or descend down.

If we now take the first part of position five we can find another pattern that can be used for left ascending or right descending. For this pattern we will use eight notes to keep it symmetrical and make it easier to remember. This obviously goes against what I said earlier about all patterns should start from the root so again, when practicing these kind of patterns, start from the root, go up and then work back down and vice versa.

And here it is played ascending and descending, starting and ending on the root.

With these two patterns we can now go to any root note and play from it in any of four directions.

Between any 12 frets you will only find six root notes, one on each string. By knowing just the location of the root notes and the two patterns you have enough information to play the minor pentatonic scale across entire neck.

For these examples remember we are still considering all the strings to be tuned evenly. Study the diagram below and you will see how the entire neck is covered simply by repeats of the same two patterns centred around the root notes. I have outlined as many as I can without it becoming too cluttered but you should have no problem seeing they are all there.

This shows us how simple it would be if the strings were all tuned evenly. A system like this can be very helpful when combined with the ideas already discussed and help you to gain good control of a scale.

Okay so this is all well and good but how does it help us in standard tuning?. Well, it’s not really much more difficult once you understand how the strings are tuned and the whole thing is made much easier as long as you only start with patterns that belong to the evenly tuned strings E A D and G as this gives us a constant to work from (which we have already done).

Basically, we can take any part of any scale pattern we like as long as it belongs to the bottom four strings and move it anywhere on the neck in standard tuning by following two rules.

1. Any part of the pattern that crosses the G to the B string ascending needs to move up one fret

2. Any part of the pattern that crosses the B to the G string ascending needs to move down one fret

Rather than attempt to over explain this it is probably easier to get the idea by studying the following series of diagrams, we start by taking the first pattern and moving it to start on each string in turn.

Note in diagram 5 there is no need to shift anything as the B to E spacing is still tuned five semitones. Also note that diagrams 3 and 4 could be viewed as descending and shifting down as you cross the B to G string as shown below.

Using pattern two

This same idea could also be used with larger patterns but sticking to the patterns belonging to the E A D G strings prevents it getting messy and confusing because some of the pattern already crosses the unevenly tuned part. If you move the full standard box pattern to start on the fifth string then you have to think more, for example in the diagram below, the dotted section of position 1 already crosses the G-B strings so it needs to be compensated on both the B and E strings when it is moved. Reusing patterns from the evenly tuned part not only keeps it simple but also helps you to think more about the scale notes rather than the pattern, although this might not seem obvious until you get used to it.

Moving some of these patterns around can require a little more thought than others but a little bit of effort and practice can make this method become very easy for a large percentage of pattern shifts. I have been using ideas like this for quite some time and can move any pattern around the neck in this way with very little thought. Like everything else you don’t get used to it overnight but once you will find it a great way to quickly think your way around an unfamiliar scale and it should speed up the process of learning new scales across the fretboard. All the common scale positions should still be learnt but combined with this idea you should find yourself learning and remembering them become a lot easier.

If you have any trouble trying to get your head around any of this then you might find it easier to first play around with smaller groups of four notes and then when you get the hang of that move on to six note symmetrical patterns.

For example, take this four note pattern here…

…and move it around the neck to start on each of these root notes.

By using only a two string pattern of four notes you can see that you only need to think about the string offset where the pattern crosses the G – B string as outlined in the orange box. Also note that these four notes alone make up an Amin7 chord so this method could be used as a means of quickly locating chord tones.

The next few diagrams show how to play about with a symmetrical pattern, this helps you get used to the idea and prepare you better for when using larger patterns like the ones we first looked at.

Take this symmetrical pattern from the standard box position and move it to other root notes across the neck

If you are finding your ideas limited when playing with any of the pentatonic positions other than position 1 then you might find you can jump start your creativity by taking a lick you already know and replicate it in another position. Unless you are new to lead playing it is pretty likely that you already have a pretty good sounding lick that uses this one of the outlined parts of the standard box position.

The diagrams below show the first part located in each of the five positions, note that position four only contains four notes so you might need to adjust your lick to only use four notes.

These diagrams show the second pattern, this time position 3 only contains four of the notes so a different lick is required again.

The more you practice and play about with ideas like this the better. So far we have covered quite a few different ideas but don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed by any of it, make sure you practice them regularly and let things just fall into place on their own, what might seem like a lot of information right now will soon become second nature to you.

Master The Pentatonics Part Five

It’s also important to know the placement of all the chords and intervals within the pentatonic shapes. Take some time to look through and learn all of these in the diagrams below. Don’t worry if all of this so far seems like too much too learn, just start making yourself aware of these things when you are playing the pentatonic scales and dedicate some of your practice time to it. This is a lot of information to take in and you won’t learn it overnight. The good news is that after a while you will find it’s actually not as bad as it first might appear because once you get going you will find all of these ideas interact with each other and you don’t actually need to learn them all as individual patterns. You should find that before you are even halfway through you will almost know the rest of it without having to learn them.

Minor Pentatonic Intervals

Major Pentatonic Intervals

What follows are some triad and chord shapes that can be found within the five patterns. Associating a chord shape with a scale pattern is another good method to find your way around the neck quickly, there’s no need to learn them all at once, you will probably do better to focus on one at a time and just start using that shape regularly until you get used to it being connected with the chord forms.

Not all of the possibilities are listed but just a few examples so spend some time to see how many more you can find.

Position 1 minor pentatonic patterns

Position 2 minor pentatonic patterns

Position 3 minor pentatonic patterns

Position 4 minor pentatonic patterns

Position 5 minor pentatonic patterns

Position 1 major pentatonic patterns

Position 2 major pentatonic patterns

Position 3 major pentatonic patterns

Position 4 major pentatonic patterns

Position 5 major pentatonic patterns

Master The Pentatonics Part Four

All of the previous chord forms were built on triads. A triad is simply a chord containing three notes. The common chord forms that use more than three strings therefore have some of these notes repeated. What we want to do now is take a look at these triads across the neck in groups of three notes only, learning these are extremely useful.

Earlier on I talked about all chords and scales being based on the major scale and the notes in the major scale are numbered one to seven starting from the root. We can create any major triad by simply taking the 1st, 3rd and 5th scale degrees (intervals) from the major scale and using them to form a chord. The minor triad is the same thing but with the 3rd scale degree flattened.

As you can see it’s easy to find which notes belong to a chord if you already know the notes of the major scales. Memorizing all of the notes that belong to all of the scales and various chords is a great tool to have at your disposal but we are only going to concern ourselves with the interval relationships for the purpose of this course. The good thing about the guitar is the way we can move things around by shifting common patterns up and down without changing the shape of the pattern. Once you start learning the location of notes on the fretboard everything starts getting easier and all we need to do to find any triad is learn a few shapes and move them to any note we want.

Note: The distance between the 1st and 3rd is called a major third interval and the distance between the 1st and 5th is called a fifth (or a perfect fifth).

The diagrams above shows examples of how these intervals are arranged in the chords and simply repeated to make use of more than just three strings. What follows is a set of major and minor triad patterns using only three notes that you should make yourself familiar with.

Most of these patterns can be associated with, and found inside the common CAGED chord forms so take some time to look closely at them and find where they might fit into the chord shapes. For example you can see here how the E form chord contains three triad shapes.

Major Triads

Minor Triads

Learning these are vital to making your solos sound more musical. This is the key to creating solos that relate to the underlying chord changes. You know that a major chord is just the three notes 1, 3, 5 and a minor chord just flats the 3rd, once you get used to these patterns you will find it easy to think of chords as individual notes or patterns which you can use to create chord related licks and phrases that really inject life into your solos.

Master The Pentatonics Part Three

If you really don’t like the sound of the pentatonic scale then who am I to argue however if you want to sound like all the other rock and blues guitarists then it’s time to rethink your belief in the pentatonics because in these two genres the pentatonic dominates. This doesn’t mean outside notes or other scales never get used but if there is one scale you should master for these styles then the pentatonic it should be.

There is a huge difference between just knowing the pentatonic scales and actually mastering them. This takes time and effort but the the result will pay off in dividends. Knowing the minor pentatonic in all five positions is not really knowing the scale. What we are going to do in this lesson is break it down, rip it apart and put it all back together again. Knowing the five positions is certainly something you should have at your disposal but now’s the time to start thinking about using the scale differently.

This lesson doesn’t contain any practical examples but all the ideas can easily be put to practical use by making your own exercises and just generally jamming around with each idea. The real goal here is to practice each idea enough times until you can say that you always know where you are on the neck at any given moment. Once you reach this point you should find you are thinking less about the five scale patterns and more about just the scale and it’s notes.

If you are in a guitar rut then don’t underestimate just how much you can improve by playing around with the ideas that follow. I don’t want to fill the lesson with loads of text trying to convince you so if you haven’t done so already then I suggest reading through some of the topics in the articles forum. Some of them have a lot to do with these lessons but I try to keep them in a separate area where possible so that we can keep our focus more to the points of the lesson.

Although this lesson is concentrating mostly on the minor pentatonic it’s very important to understand the difference between the major and minor pentatonic scales in more detail than just moving the pattern up or down by three frets. Check out the lesson about major / minor scale differences for a gripping read! .

Okay, enough talk, let’s get to it…

The five common pentatonic shapes

The five common shapes for the minor pentatonic scale are shown below. There is no real standard for numbering the positions but it’s most common to refer to position 1 as the one that starts on the sixth string root note. This is shown here as the F minor pentatonic to make it easier to view all five patterns across the neck as a whole.

These five shapes are very useful and you should spend some time practising and getting to know them well. It’s important to think of these as five separate patterns, don’t allow yourself to make use of them by counting along the fretboard to reach each position. In a moment we will be looking at ways to associate these patterns with chord shapes but for now just use the root notes as your starting point for each shape, the following example shows the best way to do this.

Both the minor and major pentatonic scales rely on the same five positions so unless you learn them as individual entities then you might find that all your ideas will sound the same whether you are trying to create a major or a minor sound as mentioned earlier. To overcome all these problems we need to delve deeper into each shape so that they can be applied more creatively. The very least you should know is the location of the root notes for each shape, these will be different for minor and major within the same pattern and of course none of this will be helpful if you cant find the notes on the fretboard very quickly so if you don’t already know them, now is the time to start learning them.

Minor Pentatonic Root Notes

Major Pentatonic Root Notes

Note that some of the notes are shaded lighter, these notes shouldn’t be viewed as the starting note. In other words when learning these patterns, always start from the root note even if it isn’t on the sixth string otherwise you will have a hard time trying to find them quickly. The best method is to start from the root note, work backwards through the shaded notes and then back to the root before continuing on with the rest of the scale pattern. For example you could practice position two for A minor pentatonic like this..

Position 2 – A minor Pentatonic

The chords inside each pattern

Another useful method of familiarising yourself with each of the five pentatonic patterns is to associate them with chord shapes just like the CAGED system does with the major scale. If you have been playing guitar for a long while then you quite likely know the common open major, minor and bar chords. Even though it’s common for guitarists to know where to find the 5 and 6 string bar chord shapes across the neck it’s not so common for them to know the C, D and G shapes.

The diagram above shows the notes on the fifth and sixth strings up to the twelfth fret without the enharmonic tones (sharps and flats ). These are the common notes used to find the five and six string bar chords. I’m sure many of you know this already but I’ll give a brief explanation just in case.

The moveable five string bar chords are based on the open A form chord shape. The root note on the fifth string is the reference point (indicated by the arrow), you can move the whole shape along the neck and whatever note that lands on is the new chord. For example the images below show how the five string A form chord can be major or minor and moved along to form C major and E minor chords.

The six string moveable bar chord is based on the open E form and the example below shows how they can be moved to form G major and C minor.

What makes these two moveable shapes so common is simply because it’s easy to use the index finger to create a bar, and act just like a capo would by moving the nut further up the neck. The C, D and G forms aren’t so common because they involve more complex fingering patterns but with practice these fingering patterns can be mastered. However even if you think they are too difficult or feel that you don’t have any need to practice them it’s still quite important that you learn them, even if you can’t play them, the more you can visualise chord tones across the neck the better your playing will become.

C, D and G major open chord forms

C major form moved to create a D major chord

D major form moved to create an A major chord

G major form moved to create a C major chord

The D minor form is also a common chord shape that can easily be moved, here you can see how it is moved to make a G minor chord

Make sure you learn to recognise the C and G forms as moveable chords but don’t despair if you can’t get your fingers to play them, just make sure you know them anyway. I won’t show them moved along as this should be obvious by now.

All of these chord forms have the root note in more than one place and you should avoid learning to recognise them from the bottom two or three strings only. Here they all are again but this time associating them with the other root notes that they contain. All of these things take time to learn but don’t overlook them, the effort will pay off in dividends even if at this moment in time you can’t possible imagine how this can improve your ideas. Once you know them you will find yourself thinking differently about the way you play whether you are using pentatonics or not.

The Other Root Notes

Knowing all of these root note positions can help quickly locate chord shapes and similarly help you find the notes on the fretboard if you already know the chord positions.

If you already know that the 10th fret on the second string is an A then it’s easy to find the D form chord for A major

Using the five string (A form) bar chord notes as a guide on the third string and vice versa

Chord Overlaps

Another thing you should make yourself familiar with is how the chords overlap. The CAGED chord shapes each share at least one note on at least one fret. For example take a look at how the C form chord and D form chords overlap in the A major positions.

The diagram below shows the overlap parts for all of the CAGED forms in A major and minor.

——–Major Forms——–

——–Minor Forms——–

So what’s all this got to do with the pentatonic scales?

In case you might be wondering how any of this stuff can be useful and what has it got to do with pentatonic’s, well it’s all about being able to visualise the fretboard as an entire unit for any given chord, note or scale. Flying up and down the neck with ease is all about knowing where you are at any moment and not counting frets or using mnemonics. It can be hard to convince people that knowing all of this is necessary but the fact is it isn’t as hard to learn as it all might seem, once you start doing it, it can all come together quite quickly as you start to see common patterns emerging… but there’s still more to come!

Master The Pentatonics Part Two

There’s more to tuning a guitar than just plugging in a tuner and checking all six open strings.

I’m not going to waste time talking about obvious stuff like how to use a guitar tuner or how to turn the machine heads (tuning pegs) to adjust the string tension. What I am going to talk about here are some common guitar tuning methods but most importantly, tuning problems you are likely to encounter and how to get around them.

Tuning the guitar the old fashioned way

Before the electronic tuners came along there were three main methods used to tune a guitar.

1. Use a piano for reference on all six notes
2. Use a pitch pipe for reference on all six notes
3. Use a tuning fork for reference on just one note

The first two are straightforward enough. Play the E, A, D, G, B and E notes on the piano or the pitch pipes and tune the guitar strings to match.

Method number three, using a tuning fork is a little harder. The most common tuning fork is set at 440hz which is the same pitch as the ‘A’ note on the guitar’s thin E string at the fifth fret. This gives you only one note to work with so you need to tune the rest of the strings in relation to each other.

Most of you will already know this but for those that don’t, here is the most common method for tuning a guitar from only one reference note. First, you can use the tuning fork to tune the ‘A’ on the thick string at the fifth fret. You then tune each string in turn by matching the pitch from the string below it. For example.. once you have the sixth string in tune you can then play it at the fifth fret while playing the fifth string open. In other words, tune the open fifth string to match the pitch of the sixth string, fifth fret. Once that is done you then move to the next string pair… Play the ‘D’ at the fifth fret fifth string and tune the open fourth string to match the pitch. Use the diagram below to do this for each string until all six strings are in tune.

This method is okay but it does present a problem. Unless you can manage to tune each string perfectly then it’s likely that by the time you reach the thin E string, it probably won’t be in perfect tune and there will be a noticeable pitch difference between the ‘thin E’ first string and the ‘thick E’ sixth string, apart from the obvious difference in octaves.

There are two reasons this happens. The first is, your hearing might not be accurate enough and the very small inaccuracy that may occur between the tuning of the fifth and sixth strings become a larger, more noticeable error by the time you get to the second and first strings. Secondly, the intonation on a guitar (more on this in a moment) is never perfect and the worse this is, the harder it is to tune the guitar, with or without an electronic tuner.

Although with a little experience and a decent guitar it’s possible to get a perfectly acceptable tuning accuracy using this method, it’s a better option to even out and average the tuning across the fretboard by combining a few tuning methods together. First, lets take a look at another common method, tuning with harmonics.

Tuning the guitar with harmonics

There are two advantages to using harmonics to tune the guitar and one disadvantage that I can think of.

Advantages

1. Easier to hear the BFO with harmonics as opposed to fretted notes
2. Using harmonics leaves your hands free to take care of tuning while both notes are still ringing

Disadvantages

1. Takes no account of guitar intonation.

First lets get a little bit technical for just a moment. What is BFO?
BFO is an abbreviation for Beat Frequency Oscillation. In short, what this means is this. If you have two tones of different pitches playing simultaneously, then a third ‘virtual’ pitch is created which is the result of the difference in frequency of the two other pitches. I use the word ‘virtual’ because I can’t think of a better way to describe it but the third pitch is however, very much a real entity, it certainly exists, it’s just that you didn’t create it yourself.

I get a feeling this might not make much sense if you aren’t technical minded so lets look at an example.

The diagram below shows the three frets where you get the strongest harmonics. Octaves aside, the seventh and twelfth fret harmonics will produce the same notes as you would get if you played the same notes fretted. The fifth fret harmonics will produce the same note as the open string.

Harmonic notes at fifth, seventh and twelfth frets.

Take a listen to the audio sample to hear the BFO in action.

I use heavy gain and distortion on the first part in this sample as it gives more sustain and also makes the BFO stand out even more. It is then followed by the same thing with a cleaner tone.

Hear Tuning Sample 1

What you hear first is the harmonic plucked at the fifth fret, fifth string followed by the seventh fret, fourth string. At first they are in tune and then as I slightly detune the fourth string, you can hear the BFO kick in to produce a pulsing sound. The more I detune the fourth string the faster it gets. What you are hearing is the difference between the two frequencies. If the two strings are tuned two hertz apart then the resulting BFO would be pulsing two times per second and so on.

The idea of tuning the guitar with harmonics is to tune the strings until this pulsing disappears. The following audio sample demonstrates this, tune the string until the ‘beat’ disappears and the strings will be in tune. Again, the sample starts with distortion and then a clean version.

Hear Tuning Sample 2

Harmonic notes used in samples

There are many ways to use harmonics, fretted notes or a mixture of the two to tune a guitar. There’s no real point in showing a thousand combinations but here’s one method you could use.

The bottom line is there are many notes repeated across the fretboard and you can use any of them to aid with guitar tuning. For instance, between the open strings and the twelfth fret there are seven A’s. You can use any one of them as a reference to tune an ‘A’ on another string, providing of course the first one is already tuned to correct pitch. Even though they won’t all be in the same octave, a little amount of experience is all it takes to get used to hearing and detecting tuning differences between the same note in different octaves. You can of course go past the twelfth fret and find even more of the same note.

Realising this becomes useful for when you are averaging out the tuning across the neck. To understand why you would want to do this requires an understanding of a problem that arises with tuning fretted instruments with more than one string.

The guitar tuning problem

Fretted instruments, such as the guitar, suffer a minor drawback when it comes to trying to get them evenly tuned. Even the most expensive guitar cannot be tuned perfectly along the whole neck because it’s design makes it impossible. While a good guitar can keep tuning inconsistencies to a minimum and hardly noticeable, cheap and badly maintained guitars sometimes have very noticeable tuning problems.

Without getting technical, the reason the guitar cannot be perfectly tuned is because fret spacing is calculated using a set formula which is based on scale length and one theoretically perfect string. Unfortunately, scale length is the only constant used in the formula, but in the real world there are many variables that can affect the ideal fret spacing. String gauge, material type, temperature, tension and height among other factors all need to be taken into account to get the ideal fret placement on the neck. Unfortunately this means the fret spacing would need to be different for every string and this isn’t very practical (even though it has been done) so an acceptable average is what we end up with.

Intonation

Intonation has a few meanings but when talking about guitar tuning, we are referring to the pitch accuracy with respect to the fret placement. As described above, we encounter a few technical problems with the design of fretted instruments. The thick E string will behave slightly different from the thin E string because of their physical size differences, especially when being stretched by the fretting hand pressing down on them. Because the frets are in a fixed position, it’s possible to get a better “average tuning” across the neck by giving each string a slightly different scale length. Ever wondered why the saddle is set at a slight angle on an acoustic guitar?. Well now you know!.

On most electric guitars the intonation is adjustable via small screws at the bridge. Many amateurs are either unaware of this or sometimes just unsure how to set them up. If these aren’t set correctly then you get all sorts of tuning problems so it’s important to check these are set properly. It’s very simple to do. The best method is with the aid of an electronic tuner but can also be done by ear.

To set the intonation of each string you just need to compare the pitch of the 12th fret harmonic and then the twelfth fret, fretted as normal. If these are different then you adjust the screw (which alters the scale length) until they match. This isn’t hard to do but can be a bit time consuming at first because as you turn the screw, you alter the string tension which changes the pitch, which changes the result. If that doesn’t make sense then don’t worry about it, as soon as you try it out, you’ll see what I mean.

Note also that old strings can cause intonation problems. It’s sometimes very difficult trying to tune a guitar well with old strings even when the intonation is setup ok.

Tuning the strings evenly across the neck

Now down to the nitty gritty. You have a half reasonable guitar, good strings and the intonation is setup correctly. With all these things in place, the guitar probably still needs to be tuned evenly across the neck. If you are lucky and have a real good guitar then this might not be something you need to pay much attention to but just be aware that every guitar will have tuning inconsistencies as you move along the fretboard.

Every time you tune a guitar, with or without an electronic tuner, you should check not just the open strings but also a few other places along the neck as well. If they are noticeably different, then you have to compromise and tune them to an average, or place more importance on the area of the neck you will be playing most.

When I tune a guitar, I usually check the pitch at the open position, fifth fret, twelfth fret and maybe the seventeenth fret for an electric guitar and go for an average on each string if necessary. There is no rule, it’s purely down to what you hear and what you are playing. If you don’t hear anything that bothers you then it doesn’t matter. If you spend most of your time playing past the twelfth fret then let that part of the neck be the priority area for tuning, if you spend most time playing open chords then tune the open strings as priority, or whatever you feel is right for the moment.

The following series of diagrams gives some idea of how you might go about checking the average tuning. There are countless amounts of cross referencing you can do, these are just some of my own preferred tuning checks in no particular order.

Red notes are harmonics and yellow notes are fretted or open strings.

Various Tuning Possibilities..

Cliché No1
Theory stifles creativity!

Cliché No2
Hendrix and the great blues players didn’t need theory!

Cliché No3
Who wants to stick to rules, theory is for geeks

To be honest, I think statements like these are the most ridiculous and uneducated responses to this debate I have ever heard. The argument is a pointless one from both sides because the real answer has nothing to do with the need to be strictly educated or non educated in theory. The real question is do you need to know theory and if so how much do you need to know. All of this depends purely on your chosen style of music and your goals as a musician. Generally speaking you could probably assume the following.

• Play camp fire style guitar – No theory required
• 12 bar blues guitarist – You could go quite far without theory
• Advanced blues guitarist – It starts getting harder without but still possible
• Rock guitarist – Yes and no, depends how far you want to go
• Advanced rock improviser – Very few will get by without good theory knowledge
• Jazz guitarist – Few will get by without good theory knowledge
• Classical composer – Theory is an absolute must

The above list I would argue is fairly accurate, but as I said, generally speaking. There will always be musicians in either camp that will argue with it but the fact is, you can only generalise because even though it will be true for the majority of guitarists, it has been proven many times there will always be somebody that comes along and shows that great musicianship can be achieved for every genre at every level with no music theory knowledge. The important thing to remember here is that these kind of people are in the minority and as the music becomes more challenging the prodigies become less common.

When it comes to the less demanding styles the amount of theory required is actually not that much and is surprisingly easy to learn. Basic knowledge can go a very long way and even if you firmly believe you can get by without it you would be forcing yourself to miss out on a huge amount of learning resources because if you don’t fully understand something then you are unlikely to find ways to apply it. Playing with ideas is one of the best ways to increase your own ability to create fresh ideas. At it’s simplest level theory is a means of musical communication if nothing else.

Never forget that no two people are the same. Just because one person might be able to get to a great level without theory knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean you can do the same. The most important thing to understand about theory is the music came first, it is nothing more than an explanation of what musicians have done over the course of many years. Is it wise to ignore all this information and then go figuring it out all over again on your own. Refusing to learn basic theory is doing just that because you can avoid it all you like but even with no knowledge of it at all you will still end up “sticking to the rules” whether you realise it or not.