Section 3.1 (New July 2000) (back to index)
Improvisation Part 2 ( make it up as you go along)
For the next step a simple five note mode is best. Play the notes A C D E G on the guitar.
A five note mode - called, technically a pentatonic mode.
If you don't know where any of these notes are you need to visit Section 1.4 Melody & Harmony basics. If you cannot figure out just where to play them - that's OK and THAT'S THE POINT ! You can play them anywhere - and here's the kicker - when you play those 5 notes against the C Major scale you CANNOT play a wrong note.
Harmonically this has a simple cause. Any of the notes in this mode added to any chord IN THE KEY OF C MAJOR simply makes an extended chord at most, but for most of the time the note will actually be in the chord - so they always work.
Play them anywhere is not much of a help. However, powerfully, this mode works in 5 places on the guitar and when learned allows you to play any of these notes anywhere on the guitar neck.
PENTATONIC MODE IN A
This mode is not too useful though if you are playing chords in the key of A Major. The guitar though makes this simplicity itself. If you made a backing track of the 12 bar blues in Part 1, you can improvise against it with the same mode but in the key of F#min. To move this mode to F# simply shift it DOWN the relevant number of semitones which is 3 and play the mode fingering there.
Without knowing the notes you can hear that they all work against the blues in A.. Play around recording the 12 bar blues in A and add a few improvised notes from the pentatonic scale of F#minor - see what you get and while you are at it - if you completely understood the last sentence you are making good progress.
....................................................more to come in Part 3
