Guitar Reviews

 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...

 I would suggest reading other posts in this series that explain Scales and Modes before going further with this post. If you find this article useful, please subscribe, it really helps my blog. This is taken from a previous post:- Learning Modes from the Pentatonic Scale As the name suggests the Pentatonic Scale is made up of 5 notes. Depending on whether you are looking at the Major or Minor Pentatonic Scale, will depend on the scale degrees used in that scale.    The Major Pentatonic scale is made up of the 1st - Major 2nd- Major 3rd- Perfect 5th - Major 6th,    The Minor Pentatonic scale constitutes the 1st - minor 3rd - Perfect 4th - Perfect 5th - minor 7th, and you can see a comparison between both scales below.       The obvious thing to say about this is that shape 1 is followed by shape 2, etc. Also, if you look closely, you can see how the shapes match each other as they move along the fretboard, i.e. shape 1 of the Minor Pentatonic...

    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 ...