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…
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!
This is an introduction to how to use the right scale for the chord of the moment. I will not be talking about modes yet as I find this creates a bit of confusion at this stage. We have seen how on every degree (=note) of the scale we can build a triad of some kind and add a 7th to it. These are three examples so you can have the most popular ‘chord shapes’ to play with and on 3 different string sets.
The first is an example in G major: the roots of the chords are all on the 6th string.
To find the correct scale for the chords just play a G major scale starting from the degree the chord sits on (like I do in the video).
G maj7 = G major from G to G (1st degree)
Am7 = G major from A to A (2nd degree)
Bm7 = G major from B to B (3rd degree)
And so on…I am sure you get the idea.
The next is an example in C major: the roots of the chords are all on the 5th string. Watch the video and find the related scales
And again this is an example in F major: the roots of the chords are all on the 4th string. You know what to do…