Wonderful words of wisdom – not to mention playing – from the master! Includes some great insights into his early influences from the blues
John McLaughlin’s guitar lesson @ PRS Part1
John McLaughlin’s guitar lesson @ PRS Part 2
Posted in Lessons, tagged John Mclaughlin on April 25, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Wonderful words of wisdom – not to mention playing – from the master! Includes some great insights into his early influences from the blues
Posted in Lessons, tagged diminished chord, dominant 7 voicing on June 6, 2014| 1 Comment »
On a previous post I showed chord voicing options for dimished chords, using different combinations of strings. Here’s the promised follow up, showing how you can use this knowledge to derive voicings for dominant chords.
Dominant chords are hugely important, not just in their own right but also as a basis for building much more complex and interesting chords. You can add just about any other note to the basic dominant and get a cool new sound. One of the most frequent additions is the b9 (flat ninth). As an example that would mean adding F to an E7 chord.
That’s just what the first two diagrams show. To keep things simple I’ve left out the low B, 2nd fret on the 5th string; but the open 2nd string gives you a high B, so the sound is still there. Go ahead and play the first two chords – it’s vital to get the sound into your ears and mind. Hear the sound of that F adding some bite to the chord?
Here’s the thing. If you simply leave out the E (6th string) from the E7(b9) what you’re left with is a diminished chord – as in the third diagram. You can think of a diminished chord as a dominant 7(b9) chord without its root.
Look at that third diagram. It’s pretty clear that if you lower the F by one fret you get back to a four-string version of plain old E7.
That gives us the key to unlock the secret: in a diminished chord, lowering any note by one fret produces a dominant 7th.
Let’s look at the dimished chord voicing on string set 4-3-2-1.
From the position shown the diminished shape yields four different dominant 7ths when you lower each note in turn.
This means that for each of the eight diminished voicings in the previous post you can get 4 dominant 7th voicings.
Put it another way, for every dominant 7th chord you can find 8 different 4-string voicings if you’re clear on the diminished shapes.
I’ll leave you to experiment with finding them and developing your own fingerings. Have fun!
Posted in Lessons on November 30, 2012| 4 Comments »
I like Jimmy Bruno’s approach to developing chord voicings. Which is that you can derive almost everything you need just by knowing your dominant 7ths really well.
On each string set (i.e. group of four strings) there are four different forms of the dominant 7th. Knowing them gives you a vast range of options for your chord voicings, without the drudge of learning them from a ‘chord book’. I share Jimmy Bruno’s dislike of such books and his love of simplifying things.
But I think it can be even simpler.
There are four dominant 7th chord forms for each string set. But you can derive each one from a single diminished 7th shape (I’ll cover how in a later post). Essentially each string set has only one useable diminished chord form. Know that shape and you can develop a universe of different chords from it.
That’s very high leverage, and it makes it worth getting closely acquainted with the diminished chord forms. There are only eight in my reckoning, so it’s a huge simplification and a powerful way to develop your approach to chords.
Here are the eight diminished chord forms.
And here are some exercises for practicing them (credit due to the great Joe Satriani for the first).
Posted in Lessons on November 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Some useful thoughts on improvising over minor chords posted originally by :>)azzTechs#
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:
D Dorian | D E F G A B C |
Over Dm7 | 1 9 b3 11 5 6 b7 |
Here’s the scale chart for D Dorian mode in its root position:
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Posted in Exercises, Tutorials, Uncategorized, tagged arpeggios, guitar, Jimmy Bruno, Jody Fisher, scales on November 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Ashdown Guitar Lessons is delighted to make available to everyone who wants it a set of charts giving fretboard patterns for Major scales and their associated Major 7th arpeggios.
If you didn’t know, it all starts here. From these scales you can derive all the other modes/scales and their arpeggios. We’ll be making other sets available over time that spell out exactly how to do this and how to put all this good theory to work in your improvisation.
The approach is based on that of Jimmy Bruno, Jody Fisher and others – if you haven’t checked out their work you’re doing yourself a disservice.
This is foundation stuff on which everything else is built and it’s essential for any improvising guitarist. These scales and arpeggios should be practiced in all keys every day until you can play them in your sleep. Then play them in your sleep as well!
Check out the page here.
Posted in Exercises, Exercises, Lessons, tagged Major and minor, pentatonic, pentatonicscale on March 29, 2012| 1 Comment »
Not sure about that title – sounds like the “Pentatonics” might be a religious denomination or a sexual orientation. But they’re neither. Pentatonic scales are really useful constructions that creep into all kinds of music, from the simplest to the most complex. I’ve published a couple of music and TAB exercises – one each for major and minor – to help to guitarists get familiar with them and apply them musically.
The exercises are sequences based on G major and G minor – the cunning plan is that you practice them in all keys. (Refer to the Circle of Fifths diagram on the right – just start at any point and play in each key around the circle until you arrive back where you started.) The sequences are organised into the widely used CAGED system. There is method in this madness.
Try it!
And if you want to know more about pentatonic music generally, try this! (Alert: heavy-duty theory warning.)