(plays guitar)
- What's up, y'all.
I'm Daniel Donato and we´ll be talking about
cosmic country in today's Fender Technique of the Week.
And there are three ideas I want to include in this video.
The first idea, which I think is very important
that all guitar players know this,
is incorporating minor and major pentatonic scales together.
Music is interesting in the sense
that there's so much variety,
but there's only major and minor songs.
And a lot of the time as soloists,
we only lean towards the minor.
Some of my favorite soloists like, Stevie Ray Vaughan,
Jimi Hendrix, they lean towards minor most of the time,
but then you can start getting
into the realms of country music
and you hear amazing soloists like,
Brent Mason, Hank Garland and Grady Martin,
a lot of players you guys might not know of actually.
But they mix major and minor scales together
in a way that's so beautiful.
It blend into other genres like what the Grateful Dead did
and what The Allman Brothers did.
Let me show you an example.
I can go minor,
then I can go major.
So if I mix both of those together in one fell swoop.
Minor.
Major.
Some of you unpackaged what I'm doing there
on a non-creative level.
So like, what are the tools that I'm using?
That is this,
minor pentatonic,
then major pentatonic.
Minor pentatonic,
and then bring it back to major.
This also happens for every other
minor-major pentatonic pattern on this whole fret board.
Minor.
Major.
Minor.
Major.
Minor.
Major.
Minor.
Major.
That right there was like the master plan.
That's 90% of what I used to improvise in,
´cause in any chance I can go
minor to major very fast.
I can go minor.
Major.
Minor.
Major.
So let me show you guys one very simple lick
that encompasses this concept.
So I can actually go minor up.
Uh.
Then major down.
Uh.
So, one more time.
And we're not even adding in chromatic [inaudible]
I'm going to talk about here in a minute.
So I'm going to take one minor melody,
play it again,
play it one more time.
And that minor melody is
3, 5,
3, 5, 7.
G, A,
C, D, E.
And then my major melody is
F sharp, E, C sharp, B, A.
14, 12, 14, 12, 10.
This is crucial!
This is how you play country music, essentially,
as you go minor, major.
Quite often you're soloing.
And the way that I practice this,
it's do call and response.
So, I have a loop going, right?
Something just in A.
I can hit minor,
and major.
Minor.
Major.
What if that's not enough?
What if you want to add in,
some notes that are in between,
some notes that are more bebop sounding,
notes that are more advanced,
maybe modes and etcetera.
I've gone through all the modes
and I've gone through all the bebop scales
that you can really imagine.
And I've kind of boiled down
to this master chromatic scale.
And this is where my influence
in Jerry Garcia really shines through,
when I listened back to my own tapes of myself playing.
Jerry had this magnificent way of playing notes
that didn't necessarily work, but do work.
Here's an example.
I can take something very simple on the major pentatonic.
But then if I read it Jerry Garcia in up a little,
I could have.
So.
This is known as chromaticism.
Jerry uses all the time.
It's really beautiful.
What it does is allow you to go
between minor and major in a very musical way,
but also in a seamless way,
so it doesn't sound "scalegular".
Maybe your soloing sounds good right now,
but it sounds a little too "scalear"
for your taste.
Adding in, these notes that are in between
is a great fix for this.
It's a good evolution for it rather.
Right. And so,
the notes that I'm hitting here are
9,10,11,12,
8,9,10.
1, 2, 3, 4.
On the G string,
6,7,8,9,
5,6,7.
That's chromaticism.
If you put chromaticism into a scale,
it would kind of look like this.
Take this,
and learn where it is everywhere.
When you know where something is in one place,
you memorized it.
But when you know where one concept is in every place,
you understand it,
and advancing your soloing from one level to the next
is the dance between memorization and understanding.
So always strive for understanding.
One more thing I want to show you
Is double stops.
So if I already take the A major scale,
and play it horizontally,
without that flat 5,
that makes a Lydian.
What I can do, therefore,
is actually add thirds on top of that.
Now I have some really beefy.
What would have been single notes, now, double stops.
And this is where that
chicken picking hybrid technique that we hear about
with country guitar starts to come in.
So, here's the scale.
And here's the lick.
So, what I'm doing here, is again,
I'm going from my 1, to my 4, to my 5.
1, 4, 5.
So,
I can go from A,
on 14, 14,
17, 14.
1, 2.
Let's bring it down to D.
16, 14, 13.
Move in anything that happens in D
you can move it up 2 frets,
it´ll be an E, which is your five.
A, B, C sharp, D, E.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Thank y´all for watching the second video
of the Tender Technique of the Week.
Gotta turn on this cosmic country phaser.
We'll see y'all next time.
(plays guitar)