(country guitar riff)
- What's going on y'all!
We're here in Austin today, I'm Daniel Donato,
playing Cosmic Country show here.
And between sound check and our show,
I wanted to talk to you guys about
fender Technique of the Week, country edition.
I want to talk to you about three things here today,
and these are gonna be the intro concepts
to the start of country guitar and playing in that genre.
It's a very simple genre,
a lot of times there's only three chords that you're using.
So, we'll be in the key of A today.
So, the way that you communicate in country music
it's also the same way in other genres,
is you use chord numbers as opposed to chordal tones.
So, as opposed to saying A, D, and E,
you actually say one, four, five.
What's amazing about that
is if you learn something in one key, just like this.
(guitar riff)
Then you can move it to your four.
(guitar riff)
You could also move it to your five.
(guitar riff)
Many songs are made of one, four, and five,
and knowing how to crack this code is very wise. So.
One lick I want to talk about right here
is a major pentatonic lick.
In blues, a lot of the time we use the language
of minor pentatonic, and same in jazz as well.
Country really actually incorporates
about fifty percent of each.
So, I can actually take a really simple
major pentatonic melody that's no more than five notes.
(pentatonic guitar riff)
One, two, three, four, five, one.
So the scale tones that I'm using
are one, two, three, five, six, one.
A, B, C sharp, E, F sharp, A.
So, I could take this.
(pentatonic guitar riff)
And I can actually play it two more times.
(pentatonic guitar riff)
And I can play it one more time.
(pentatonic guitar riff)
This is insane. When you play blues a lot of time,
you stay stuck in one scale.
(blues guitar riff)
Thing about country is you can take one melody,
(country guitar riff)
another melody,
(country guitar riff)
same melody different register,
(country guitar riff)
and then you all of sudden are able to hit
every single possible A note on the guitar.
(country guitar melody)
One more time.
(country guitar melody)
Let's talk about that very slowly.
I'm on fret five, seven, nine, seven, nine, seven,
on the E and A string.
Five, seven, nine, seven, nine, seven.
Same thing here, same notes.
Seven, nine, eleven, nine, eleven, nine,
on the D and G string.
(guitar riff)
So one more time.
Five, seven, nine, seven, nine, seven.
Seven, nine, eleven, nine, eleven, nine.
Same notes, different strings.
Ten, twelve, fourteen, twelve, fourteen, twelve.
(guitar riff)
So one more time.
(guitar riff)
When you're practicing too,
always make sure to practice backwards.
Practicing backwards is relevant
because if you can process information backwards
and do that correctly, that also means
you can process it moving forward that much better.
And the more that you can process things
in simultaneous directions,
these are just to improvise community on the guitar,
and have fun with it.
If you have fun, it sounds more fun.
Therefore, it sounds better. So.
(country guitar melody)
Amazing! Another thing about country guitar,
is that you can change keys very easily.
So, by using the major pentatonic scale,
major scale in general,
there's also those you can use,
but really it's just the major scale.
What I want to do, is I can take this idea,
(guitar riff)
and I can move that same thing to D.
(guitar riff)
I can do the same thing in E.
(guitar riff)
So if I have something like this guy,
(country guitar melody)
One more thing I want to show y'all,
it's a very easy country guitar technique,
are pedal steel bends.
Again, you can use these to play along with the chords.
Playing along with the chords is very musical.
If you have the need to become a soloist
that plays along with the chords,
and if you're soloist that wants to sound more musical,
you want to take your soloing up to just that next tier,
playing along with the chord progression
is a crucial element to obtain.
Doing that in a way that's easy is actually possible.
Sounds complex, but it's not.
We already talked about one way.
(guitar riff)
And then one more. Let's check this out.
(country guitar riff)
That's for A.
What I'm gonna do is actually bend into an A chord
just on these top strings.
So on the G string I have four, five, five, B and E.
(country guitar riff)
Then I have it in D.
(country guitar riff)
That's on nine, ten, nine.
And then in E, eleven, twelve, twelve.
(country guitar riff)
Even this.
(country guitar melody)
Thank you all for watching fender Technique of the Week.
This is Daniel Donato, stay tuned for the next video
on Cosmic Country, I'll see y'all next time.
(guitar riff)