In this lesson, we’re going to look at the ‘Minor Blues Scale’.
The minor blues scale is perhaps the most popular scale for guitarists (and indeed other instrumentalists). Why? Because it can be used effectively in many different situations, it has an in-built ‘blues sound’, and it lends itself very easily to things such as bends and slides.
In this lesson, we’re going to look at how to interpret scale diagrams. Scale diagrams are used a lot throughout this site, so it’s important to understand how to read them.
Before we get right into it, it’s important to understand that conventions for writing out scales do vary, depending on who is writing them out. The main point of variation being the direction in which the strings and frets are set out. Some people place the strings in the diagrams horizontally, the frets vertically and some people do the opposite.
How do you tune a guitar? If you’ve just started playing guitar, this is one of the first and most pressing questions that you will have. No matter what you are planning to play or learn on the guitar, you need your guitar to be in tune. This means that you will need to know how to tune your guitar – regularly and accurately.
Beginners often think that once their guitar is in tune, they are all set for a while. This is not the case. You should get into the habit of tuning your guitar once a day, or even more. Guitar is not like a piano, where you generally only need to get it tuned once every few months. The intonation on the guitar is temperamental and is easily affected by many things – the weather, how often it’s played, the room it’s in, being transported around. It’s very easy for a guitar to go out of tune.
You need to know how to tune a guitar if you want to be a guitarist.
This is the next piece in the ‘Guitar Bits and Pieces’ series – a collection of short, interesting and fun pieces.
It is called E Minor Funk and is an uptempo funk piece, based on E minor.
Have a listen, download sheet music and give it a go. Enjoy!
In this lesson, we are going to discuss what ‘voice leading’ is and how it relates to guitar playing.
Voice leading, in very general terms, is about how you move from one chord to another. To best understand the concept, it can help to break it down into two very general subcategories – ‘good voice leading’ and ‘poor voice leading’. Keep in mind that these categories are very general and we are using them as a way of better understanding the overall concept. After all, ‘good’ is largely a matter of taste and is hard to quantify.
The Augmented 7 Arpeggio contains the following:
1 – 3 – #5
This arpeggio (and chord) is a type of dominant 7 chord, because it contains the natural 3rd and the flat 7th. The thing that gives it its unique sound is the sharp 5.
As with all scales and arpeggios, we want to learn 5 movable shapes up and down the fretboard for the minor major 7 arpeggio. Let’s look at the 5 shapes, using G Augmented 7 as the example arpeggio: