Had an eye opening guitar lesson last night

Steinmetzify

Steinmetzify

Well-known member
So I decided to start doing the forum jams that people throw out once a month.....just to break out of a doom/metal rut I've been in for awhile, combat some 'audience fear' I've had since forever, and just generally play some cool blues type stuff which for whatever reason I don't do anymore and miss.

Talked a friend into doing one that I did as well, and he just killed it.

I picked up a guitar at about age 13 (40 now) and never took a lesson....I'm self-taught and it shows, especially when doing leads. :doh:

My jam sounded ok to me, but I'm stuck in that necessary but hated pentatonic box, and his was 5 full minutes of nothing repeating and sounded killer...pretty much exactly how I'd want my stuff to sound, with minor variations.

We were talking about it, and I was bemoaning the fact that mine didn't sound as good, and he offered me a lesson or 17. Decided to take him up on it last night, and inside of two hours he unlocked so many things for me.....showed me some scales that would fit in with what I already knew so I could have more notes for different expressions, and things are starting to fit together; the 'roadmap' of random notes on a fretboard now have names and some lines drawn connecting the dots.

Just wanted to post it up because I'm hyped; I understand so much more now than I did yesterday and I can already hear a difference. I'm gonna redo the MLP jam today with some of the stuff he showed me, and with any luck it should sound much better. :rock:
 
Any chance you'll sketch out what he showed and post it up?

Maybe the Pent notes you already knew in black with colored notes to show what you learned?
 
Dude it was pretty simple, really. I'm sure you guys already know this stuff; some of the best players I've ever heard have been on this board.

I knew the pentatonic scale and could use it to solo in some blues tunes, but because that's all I knew it would sound the same after awhile; he threw the Aeolian scale in A at me, just because I usually start lead blues stuff using the pentatonic on the A or D string, and didn't know why I could hit some notes that weren't in that scale and they'd sound good and some didn't...the notes that I'd hit randomly just jamming and sounded good were part of a different scale that I didn't know....was hitting those by accident, and couldn't figure out where the rest of them were.....get me?


What he told me was that for those notes, I was actually sliding into a minor scale...showed me that scale and where it fits into what I was playing, and suddenly something that'd bugged me for literally years made sense. He explained that fingerings for scales don't change, just whatever key you're in does, and that opened up a whole new dimension for me....you can use these scales pretty much anywhere, which means I can play over the whole board instead of 3 strings on 8 different frets. :doh:

Just knowing that has altered the way I look at the fretboard entirely...as I said, I've never had a lesson; just do what sounds good to me and regurgitate it in different tempos or whatever, you know? So this changed up my game and let me do things I'd never tried before, just because I didn't know the patterns....and he did it in a way that was entirely acceptable for a guy that had never had a lesson before. The terms that people use were completely foreign to me because of my lack of theory, and dude approached it like I knew nothing and it made complete sense, combined with the pentatonic scale and how they fit together.

He also taught me that when you learn that scale (on a standard tuned guitar), the first 7 notes are the first 7 letters of the alphabet, and then the 8th note is an octave of the first, which is A, so now if I know what key a song should be in, I know where to start, which is huge for me....instead of fucking around trying to find the right note and getting frustrated I just know, automatically. I've never had that before.

Was just really cool to me because it's made me be able to get some of the sounds in my head out of the guitar and onto a clip.....things that would be a natural progression for someone with some knowledge were beyond me because I couldn't make the notes fit together, you know? But now I can, and for me that's so fuckin cool I can barely stand it. :D

ctoddrun":3cmi8njs said:
Any chance you'll sketch out what he showed and post it up?

Maybe the Pent notes you already knew in black with colored notes to show what you learned?
Click to expand...

I can do that if you want me to....I explained what I learned up there, and if it's something you already knew then I won't bother. (You're playing Tool songs man, you already know this, yeah?) Let me know, and I'll do it right away.
 
Steinmetzify":of4unf0v said:
Dude it was pretty simple, really. I'm sure you guys already know this stuff; some of the best players I've ever heard have been on this board.

I knew the pentatonic scale and could use it to solo in some blues tunes, but because that's all I knew it would sound the same after awhile; he threw the Aeolian scale in A at me, just because I usually start lead blues stuff using the pentatonic on the A or D string, and didn't know why I could hit some notes that weren't in that scale and they'd sound good and some didn't...the notes that I'd hit randomly just jamming and sounded good were part of a different scale that I didn't know....was hitting those by accident, and couldn't figure out where the rest of them were.....get me?


What he told me was that for those notes, I was actually sliding into a minor scale...showed me that scale and where it fits into what I was playing, and suddenly something that'd bugged me for literally years made sense. He explained that fingerings for scales don't change, just whatever key you're in does, and that opened up a whole new dimension for me....you can use these scales pretty much anywhere, which means I can play over the whole board instead of 3 strings on 8 different frets. :doh:

Just knowing that has altered the way I look at the fretboard entirely...as I said, I've never had a lesson; just do what sounds good to me and regurgitate it in different tempos or whatever, you know? So this changed up my game and let me do things I'd never tried before, just because I didn't know the patterns....and he did it in a way that was entirely acceptable for a guy that had never had a lesson before. The terms that people use were completely foreign to me because of my lack of theory, and dude approached it like I knew nothing and it made complete sense, combined with the pentatonic scale and how they fit together.

He also taught me that when you learn that scale (on a standard tuned guitar), the first 7 notes are the first 7 letters of the alphabet, and then the 8th note is an octave of the first, which is A, so now if I know what key a song should be in, I know where to start, which is huge for me....instead of fucking around trying to find the right note and getting frustrated I just know, automatically. I've never had that before.

Was just really cool to me because it's made me be able to get some of the sounds in my head out of the guitar and onto a clip.....things that would be a natural progression for someone with some knowledge were beyond me because I couldn't make the notes fit together, you know? But now I can, and for me that's so fuckin cool I can barely stand it. :D

ctoddrun":of4unf0v said:
Any chance you'll sketch out what he showed and post it up?

Maybe the Pent notes you already knew in black with colored notes to show what you learned?
Click to expand...

I can do that if you want me to....I explained what I learned up there, and if it's something you already knew then I won't bother. (You're playing Tool songs man, you already know this, yeah?) Let me know, and I'll do it right away.
Click to expand...
I'm in the same boat as you. Self taught/ruined. Maybe 8hrs at most of formal instruction. I learn visually with scale patterns. Seems like muscle memory is easier to attain after a few repetitions of a pattern on the fret board.
Keep on keepin on metal brother.

I need to road-trip to Utah so we can get Doomy some weekend.

Joel
 
LowDesertSludge":19usly9m said:
I'm in the same boat as you. Self taught/ruined. Maybe 8hrs at most of formal instruction. I learn visually with scale patterns. Seems like muscle memory is easier to attain after a few repetitions of a pattern on the fret board.
Keep on keepin on metal brother.

I need to road-trip to Utah so we can get Doomy some weekend.

Joel
Click to expand...

That'd be badass...got a brother that lives down there; I go see him once in a while. I'll let you know next time I go. :rock:
 
I'm stuck in this as well... am completely self taught... have no idea what I'm doing... I have really good ears thank god, literally everything I do just comes from my ears... I literally don't know a single scale... just "patterns" that I know work from trial and error over the years...
 
When I figured out how to blend major and minor pentatonic licks together in the same scale over a 12 bar blues, everything came together for me. It's also a common thing found in any hard rock soloing: angus, Clapton, evh, page, whoever. Once you get that down, you will feel a lot more confident and other licks and scales will seem to make more sense.
 
I know it seems kinda lame to some but I have had a jamplay account for a while and I can't even measure how much I have learned on there. So many licks, ideas, theory, chords etc etc etc... I really suggest people check it out.
 
sixty-niner":31ehezkf said:
I just found out about the blending part a couple of days ago watching this lesson. GREAT lesson, one of the best I have ever seen online , he has a couple of others 4-5 which are ALL GREAT LESSONS.
Highly recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9sAhJvG ... URRHby2wEw
Click to expand...

Watched it and it almost made sense.....I've been messing around with scales all day and it's blurring together now. I've saved that one to watch....I can hear/see what he's saying and I know it's going to help me greatly. But not today. Thanks for posting it!
 
I went to GIT in the 90s right outta college because I wanted to do studio work and I learned from a teacher there how to blend pentatonic scales and modes on top of each other, you guys should learn the modes if you don't already and play the three note scales over the two note scales, sounds great...am I making any sense?
 
Lampshade1973":z0nr0lor said:
I went to GIT in the 90s right outta college because I wanted to do studio work and I learned from a teacher there how to blend pentatonic scales and modes on top of each other, you guys should learn the modes if you don't already and play the three note scales over the two note scales, sounds great...am I making any sense?
Click to expand...

Thanks to the lessons I had last night and this afternoon, you are making a very tiny little bit of sense. It's fuzzy, it's hazy, but I kind of understand what I think you might be thinking you're talking about. :thumbsup:
 
randy Rhodes used to do it, he would blend a major pentatonic scale and a Dorian scale and play them over each other and play licks between the two within the same four frets, I stole a lot of licks from randy but I can't pull them off nearly as good as him, my next challenge is blues....
 
I still take lessons. Every couple months go see a guy that is a studio player now. Get a concept introduced and some jam tracks to work over.

One very simple thing that opened a huge door was the relative minor concept.

Say you are in A, drop back three frets to your relative minor chord.

You are jamming away in the basic three chords of A. A,D,E. relative minor chords to your three main chords are F#m, Bm, C#m. If you play around with the relative minor chords you can hear how they are put in bridges or choruses of songs. If you know that concept, it covers literally 90% of what is out there.

You know the pentatonic box. Move to a relative minor chord position and throw in a few notes from the scale. It will feel the same way the that shifting to a relative minor chord does.

I highly recommend you record what you play. Get a boom box. Anything. Being able to predictably shift to relative minor will sound smooth and let you get that thing so many people call soul or emotion. You will immediately hear when you do it correctly in playback. My guitar teacher says the recorder will be your guitar teacher for telling you what sounds wrong.

There are tons of backing tracks in a key with a relative minor section. Perfect practice makes perfect. Poor practice develops bad habits that seem to last forever.
 
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