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Take the Lead
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By David Hamburger
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| | Photo Credit: Anne Hamersky
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Tune Up
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A Minor-Pentatonic Scale
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PRACTICE PLAN
LEVEL:
Get comfortable playing through the A Minor-Pentatonic Scale (above) so your fingers know where to go. Then practice the examples slowly enough that you can play them in time (start at about 60 bpm, and hold those rests out for their full counts!), then gradually work up to about 100 bpm. To really master this lesson, create your own licks, modify them to target the different roots, and use the call-and-response technique to build a 12-bar blues of your own.
SONGS: “Pride and Joy”
(page 44 of the Summer issue).
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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ALMOST EVERYBODY’S first experiences with lead guitar start with the venerable minor-pentatonic scale (A MINOR-PENTATONIC SCALE, above). Spend a little time with this scale, and you’ll be able to move your fingers through all the right notes, from the bottom or the top. Spend a little more time, and you may find yourself thinking, “Hey, wait a second. I just sound like someone playing through a scale thingy. Where are the cool licks I sent for?”
It’s from such perceptive and highly justifiable outrage that true enlightenment springs—theoretically, anyway. Fact is, those cool licks are lurking within these scales, but when you play a scale up or down in order, it can’t help but sound like a scale. The trick is to pull the scale apart, pick a few essential notes to work with, and focus on how you use those notes. We’re going to work with two kinds of how in this lesson: phrasing, the kinds of rhythms you use to play your notes, and root targeting, which means landing on the root note of the chord that is being played at any given moment.
Land Your Licks on the Root
Instead of beginning at the lowest or highest note of the minor-pentatonic scale, let’s start right in the middle, with the A on the seventh fret of the fourth string, right. This is the root of the scale (basically, the note where the scale starts), just like the first and last note of the A Minor-Pentatonic Scale fingerings, but in a more central and therefore more useful location.
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Root
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Starting from here, the next two notes in the scale, the flatted third and fourth, are just a string away. The other two notes in the scale—the fifth and flatted seventh—are also close by.
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Root, b3, 4, 5, b7, Root
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TARGET THE A, below, shows our first actual lick. Since its last note is an A (the root of an A7 chord) that lands squarely on the one or downbeat of the second measure, you can think of this lick as “targeting” or aiming for the root of an A7 chord.
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Target the A
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Change the last note to a D (the root of a D7 chord), as in TARGET THE D, and this lick targets a D7 chord.
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Target the D
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