FIRST THINGS FIRST.. If you find this article useful, please subscribe, it really helps my blog. There are certain patterns that appear on the guitar fretboard and it is worth looking at these and memorising them to make things easy for yourself when learning any sort of scale or modes. These patterns are great to across the fretboard but by changing the starting point, you may also move up the fretboard. There are three main patterns to consider when looking at the guitar, and they will always follow each other. These are those patterns:- I have put notes on these diagrams for context, it is the shape we are concerned with here, not the actual note..yet. Just look at how the notes relate to the others in each individual pattern. The next thing we shall look at is the root note for each shape. We will consider the Major Scale - or Ionian Mode first. MAJOR SCALE So let us look at pattern 1 above and see what we can make of it. You can firstly see it is a block of three...
INTERVALS Intervals are important in music and they are the basics for chord and scale construction. An interval is the difference in pitch between one note and another. Intervals can be either designated melodic or harmonic. A melodic interval is when notes are played in a melody (unsurprisingly lol), and harmonic intervals are notes that are played at the same time eg. a chord, double-stop, etc. Ok, so what harmonic and melodic Intervals do I need to know? Good question, thank you for that. I will endeavour to answer it, (mmm clears throat…) Wow, that looks confusing.. This may be easier Intervals are designated as either perfect (P), major (M) or minor (m). If you look at the fret diagram you can see that written above the sixth semitone is Ƅ 5. Above that is the type of interval, in this particular case it is a A4/d5. This is an Augmented 4th or a Diminished 5th (sometimes called the Tri-Tone). All this means is the Perfect 4th note has been sharpen...
modes (sounds scary, eh?) Not really. Music modes explained Modes in music have been around for a long time, they are nothing new. They were formalized in the 1600’s and are used in all types of music and used by a wide variety of musical instruments. Should I learn modes? Learning modes allows you to colour any tune you are playing, or improvising, with feeling. It also allows the sound of the song to focus on a differing tonal centre. If your playing is beginning to sound boring and you feel you are stuck in a rut, this could another reason to study modes. Modes can be seen as scales within a parent scale. Many people use mode and scale to mean the same thing, however, this is not strictly true. A mode can be seen as a scale of it’s parent scale, derived from a different point in the parent scale. All modes are scales but not all scales are modes. The Blues Scale for example is not a mode. From the ...
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