Ashdown Guitar Lessons

In this tutorial we’ll have a look at the guitar scales, arpeggios and substitutions we can use to improvise over minor guitar chords, so we can make our guitar solos more interesting. Unless specified, we take a Dm chord as example. Here’s a roundup:

 The 3 minor diatonic scales (Dorian, Phrygian, Aeolian) are the obvious choice for playing over minor chords. Which of the 3 scales you play depends on the harmonic setting and the function of the chords you are playing over.

The Dorian mode is played over II chords, like in a II V I chord progression.

We’ll take a 2 5 1 in C major as an example:

|Dm7          |G7           |Cmaj7        |%             |
|II           |V            |I            |              |          

Over the Dm7 we play the D Dorian scale:

Here’s the scale chart for D Dorian mode in its root position:

The Dorian scale is also…