For the sake of today's lesson, I'm going to use the blues scale, or the pentatonic scale with the blues note, just so that everyone is on the same page.
Disclaimer: Review any scale you want to improvise with.
But if you want to follow along, here are all the different shapes of the A minor blues scale:
Make sure you get a good hang of whatever scale you wish to use while improvising before moving on tp the next steps.
Since we are in a minor key, you can also use the natural minor scale for this.
And the same goes for it's relative major scale, in this case C Major.
Check out minute @2:37 for a demonstration on that.
The main thing here, is being able to play your scale of choice in different areas of the fretboard unlocking more freedom of expression when we start improvising.
We don't have to worry about being creative right now, what really matters is visualizing the new shapes.
Notice how we're only playing the arpeggios on the highest 3 strings of the guitar (High e, B, and G Strings).
This is only done to keep things simple, but feel free to complicate this as much as you like you could use:
- 5 string arpeggios.
- 7th arpeggios.
- Triads on other strings.
We're also going to stick with just the highest 3 strings of our chosen scale for now. I'm going to ascend the arpeggio and descend the scale.
Important timestamps:
-1st inversion + blues scale position demo check out min @6:07
-2nd inversion + blues scale position 2+3 demo check out min @7:15
Here the 2nd inversion of the minor arpeggio covers both blues scale positions, I chose to play both, but you can chose one or the other.
-Root position + blues scale position 4 demo check out min @7:46
Get very familiar with those new shapes practice them really well because next step is where things get really fun.
