Tag: blues

Posted in Special Topics

Jog Scale

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This is a scale I know as ‘Jog scale’. I am sure even though you might not know it by name, you have heard its sound before, as it is featured in a lot of Beatles tunes, and also a favorite of guitarist Eric Johnson. It has an Indian flavor to my ears…just watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. In the PDF file below you’ll find the 5 inversions/modes and relative fingerings in the key of G. It sounds best over G7 (or G7sus4), Fmaj7#11, and B7#9, but feel free to experiment…

Download: Jog Scale PDF

Good Luck.

Posted in Special Topics

Playing with a Slide – Tips

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Slide: Hints and Tips

Don’t we all love playing slide? Here some tips on phrasing and a couple of ideas on open tunings widely used to play in this style.

The tuning I use in the second part of the video is what is know as G open tuning, so from the 6th string (low E) to the 1st (top E):

D G D G B D

6 5 4  3 2 1

Posted in The Blues

More Advanced Blues stuff (the Miles/Robben thing)

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Advanced pentatonic stuff.

There are when times you can get bored of playing just the pentatonic on a blues, or maybe you’ve heard more contemporary blues players like Robben Ford, or blues influenced jazz guys like John Scofield and Scott Henderson. Well, here I come to help you out with a couple of tips: first I go over the ‘blues scale’, still quite a basic concept. Just add the b5 to a minor pentatonic and there you go, you have the ‘blues scale’.

A much more interesting thing happens when you start mixing up the H-W Diminished scale with a minor or major pentatonic scale. This will give you a few nice tensions:

Half step – Whole step Diminished scale in C:

C  Db  Eb  Fb  Gb  G  A   Bb
T  b2   b3  3    b5  5 13  b7

C minor pentatonic:

C  Eb  F  G  Bb
T  b3  4  5  b7

C major Pentatonic:

C  D  E  G  A
T  2   3  5  6

Well, mix and match tastefully and you’ll get some new flavors, guaranteed. Listen to some of the examples I play in the video. Good luck!

Posted in The Blues

Basic pentatonic major-minor

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Basic Pentatonic stuff

I will not get too much into pentatonics as you can find stuff all over the net. Too much has been said and done on the famous ‘pentatonic box’…As I say in the video, a major pentatonic is a major scale without the 4thand 7th degree. So C major pentatonic is: C D E G A These are the 5 positions for the major pentatonic, in the example in G major (but valid for all keys). Of course, remember that if you start from the 6th (the 5th note of the pentatonic – also ‘box’ N.5) you will have the relative minor. In the example in G the minor pentatonic will be E, just like E minor is the relative minor of a G major scale. The last box at the bottom right is the famous ‘blues scale’…a minor pentatonic with an added b5. Try and learn them just like we did for the major scale…all keys, down every single string, from lowest note to highest note on the fretboard and so on. Find the ‘5 boxes’ position fingerings below:

Printable PDF: Pentatonic Fingerings