Hello, Justin here.
What we're gonna check out now is a couple of ways
of using your minor pentatonic scale
to give a little bit more variation.
Now, with this sort of scales
and melodic patterns and stuff
you are what you eat.
If you practice playing a scale
just up and down all the time
when it comes to improvise
which is what we're gonna be checking out next,
with the scale,
you'll find that you tend to play the scale up and down
and that's really, really boring.
So, what I'm gonna try and show you
is a few ways that you might like to try
and vary the scale to make it
a little bit more interesting.
So, the first thing we're gonna do
is called a 'melodic pattern'
and that's if we number the scale
from like the first note being 1,
the second note being 2, the third note being 3,
the fourth note being 4 etc.
and then we create a little kind of
a maths number sequence.
So, the one that we're gonna start off with is
1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5, etc.
Now, I'm gonna put that little pattern on the web site
so you can see cause
those little patterns are very obvious
when you see them written down.
So, what I want you to do is check that on the web site
and then have a little look and play along with this pattern.
Now, it's kind of a triplet pattern.
Now, we've talked about triplets before
which is dividing a beat into three
cause, you know, there's three numbers
in a sequence, right?
1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4
We're not gonna try and play it with the rhythm like
1, 2, 3 - 2, 3, 4.
We want triplets. We want
1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5, 4, 5, 6.
Each time progressing along
and keeping the notes
evenly placed between each other.
So, let me play it for you through just once
at a medium speed
and then we will play through it nice and slowly together.
So, here we go, just nice and slowly,
all the way up and all the way back.
. . .
If I break just a little bit of that
you can hear it almost does sound like a lick
like a little muscial phrase
that you might use in a solo. If you went
. . .
...or something. You can hear it kinda makes it
melodically a little more interesting.
So, let's go it through and do that
really, really nice and slow.
The easiest way to do this stuff is to read along a tab
which there is on the web site,
so maybe you go and have a read at that
and watch the video along with
being able to watch that tab.
So, here we go. Let's assume you can watch
two things at the same time
like, I don't know how you wanna do that
but you can try.
OK, here we go. Nice close-up with this one.
So, we've got -
I'm gonna call out here now the note numbers:
1, 2, 3 - so we got up three.
Now we go back one and up three again:
1, 2, 3 - we go back one, and up three: 1, 2, 3.
Get back to the last note we've played and up three:
1, 2, 3. Back to the last note we played and up three.
Back to the last note we played
. . .
Back one, up three.
. . .
Back one again, up three.
. . .
Back one, up three.
. . .
Now we got to the top.
We're now going down three, up one.
So down three.
. . .
Up one and down three.
. . .
Up one, down three.
. . .
Up one, down three.
. . .
Now, we did that one deliberately slowly
with a little stop in between each of the groups
so you could give you a bit of time
to figure out where the numbers were.
So, now let's just do it nice and slowly
but without that little gap.
So you're playing it as triplets now.
Here we go: 3, 4-trip-let
1-trip-let, 2-trip-let, 3-trip-let, 4-trip-let, 5-trip-let,
6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
You get back: 1-trip-let, 2...
. . .
So, that's sequence '1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4'.
Some people refer to it as the sequence called
'three in a line'.
Now, you can apply almost any number game
that you like to this stuff.
It's a really, really good way of exploring the scale
and getting your fingers to do maybe the things
that they might not naturally do.
And one of these things is playing the notes that are
in the same fret but on different strings.
So, I'm just gonna show you one more cool little exercise.
It kind of introduces a technique called 'rolling'
which I'm not gonna go too much into in this lesson
but there's some information on that
in the technique area of my web site
so you might wanna go and check that out as well.
I'm just gonna really show you the basic movement
of the pattern in the scale, not the technique.
So, here we go. What we will do this time is
we play the first note
and then we miss one note and play the next one.
then we go back to the note we missed,
miss one play the next one,
back to the note we missed,
miss one, play the next one,
back to the note we missed,
miss one play the next one,
back to the note we missed,
play the next one, no, sorry : miss one, play the next one,
back to the one we missed,
miss one, play the next one
. . .
etc.
. . .
And then exactly the opposite down
. . .
This is a really, really cool little sequence,
sometimes called 'playing in fourths'.
Now, as soon as you start to speed it up a little bit
. . .
you can start to hear it sounds kinda hip.
It doesn't sound -
. . .
it's not so 'scaley' any more.
cause it's a little bit different.
It's a way that your fingers might not normally move
when practicing scales,
so it's a really good way of kinda getting your hand
to do those little weird things
and it's a big help when you start
trying to play some licks and you're improvising.
So, improvising is where we're at now,
so, let's have a bit of a look, see at that.