Blues Guitar Lesson – Major and Minor Pentatonics

In this lesson I will be introducing you to a concept that has a surprising lack of coverage on YouTube. A lot of blues players pride themselves on being able to create different moods on the guitar - Being able to switch between light, melodic and sweet sounds to aggressive, quick and hard hitting sounds. Now, a lot of this comes from a players character and feel towards the music, but we can work towards this style of playing by simply switching between major and minor pentatonics. So, if you began life as a rock player like me, then you'll have spent a lot of time tackling your minor pentatonics. This is great, and I highly recommend a thorough knowledge of the 5 pentatonic shapes, but we also need to understand the major pentatonic. For this lesson we will need the pentatonic shape 1 and 2. The concept I want you to get into your heads is being able to combine the pentatonic shape 1 and the pentatonic shape 2 on top of each other. This sounds crazy, but if you are playing over a blues backing track in the key of C (not C minor or C major... just C blues), then you can play your C minor pentatonic scale as follows: You can also play your C major pentatonic scale (shape 2) as follows: Put the two together, and you have an instant way to create different 'shades' within your improvising. The major pentatonic over the track sounds sweet, melodic and is often played with a lot more space than the minor, purely because it is easier to create melodies. The minor pentatonic has a much more aggressive feel, especially when used to

Congratulations to our March Students

Congratulations to Matt & Hoppy with their finished Custom Colour Strats. Both played and sounded great, really difficult to choose between them; the 50's style blue finish or the more 70's looking blackĀ on black. Both iconic looking. 2 great Students, 2 great guitars.