четверг, 9 сентября 2010 г.

Hello, friends!As I promised before, it's time for practice. Let's start with minor pentatonic scale.This scale consists of only five notes.Pentatonic scale is very important in any style of music. All the notes of pentatonic can be used in improvisation even if you just started to learn your instrument. Pentatonic scale has a very stable sound, so you can not hit a wrong note:). Also pentatonic scale can be used as a skeleton for soloing and learning different scales. Later on I'll show you how easy it is to learn any scale if you know pentatonics. There are two pentatonic scales: major and minor( parallel). In fact it's just ONE scale. So if you have C major pentatonic and start with A you'll get A minor pentatonic. I choose minor pentatonic because it seems it's more frequently used in different method books. Those of you who play guitar must know minor pentatonic boxes and many blues lick played in them:). Diminished tuning allows us to use such boxes to better memorize the scale( lick, arpeggio) layout
So, let's start! We'll take only one position for now.

Here's minor pentatonic scale in BLOW position:

C Eb F# A minor pentatonic scales

Numbers indicate scale degrees. I use colors of rainbow(from RED to Violet) for better memorizing the schemes and function of notes. It's obvious that everyone tends to play in easy keys ,but in the case of diminished tuning you can learn ALL the keys from the start. I'm not using a notation staff here because there are a lot of examples in web. Minor pentatonic is very good as a starting point because you can improvise not only in minor songs, but you can play the 12 bar blues using only minor pentatonic( as majority of rock guitarists do:). For practice I recommend start with the blues.

Later on I'll show you how to build any scale with pentatonic as a skeleton.

2 комментария:

  1. Hello from the russian harmonica forum. :)

    Could you explain in next posts these things:
    1) What kind of music do you usually play?
    2) What results have you got now? I mean in which keys and scales can you play and improvise now? How much time did it take for each scale?

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  2. Hello, Zauberer! Glad to see you here:)
    I hope to add some audio or video with examples soon.
    I started to play mostly diminished harp only this summer. So the results are not great at the moment.
    I've learnt some evergreens(Lullabye of birdland, Autmn leaves,Moonlight in Vermont, for example) and many of the Beatles songs. I also concentrate on playing major scales and triads of the scales in every key wich is easy on dimi. One of the main thing i'm working now is intonation of the bends.
    Stay tuned and I hope there will be something interesting here

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