Rock Lead 01 - Pentatonic Scale Extensions

Hello and welcome to lesson one in this lead guitar course, where we're gonna be looking at the A minor pentatonic scale, which all this course is based on, but just briefly, cos hopefully it is a refresher for most of you guys. And then we're gonna look at some most common extensions. To this scale where we can play it using lower notes and higher notes from the same scale and moving up the fretboard, uh, which is the same thing that our licks and solos are going to be doing a little later on in this course. So the A minor pentatonic scale um starts in position 1 at the 5th fret of the thickest Estring. We would then use our little finger to play the 8th frets. And from then on for the next 3 strings, it's 5th fret and 7th fret, 5 to 7. 5 to 7 again. And then it's on the thinnest two strings that we would play 5 and 8. And this is commonly taught as for beginners using. The 1st and little finger to play the 8th fret as we go down this scale. So that one more time, and this is a refresher from my beginner's course. No. Being able to demonstrate that scale as I've just played it is basically a minimum requirement for being able to do this course. So if you can't do that yet, you need to check out the minor pentatonic scale lesson on my website and uh have a good refresher on that. One thing I will say before we move on from here is that we're going to be commonly playing the thinnest, uh, the highest note on the thinnest two strings, so the 8th fret here and here, with the 3rd finger, and we're gonna be having our fingers more on an angle. And the reason for this is we're going to be string bending. So when we move through this scale. We want to be moving this thumb over the top. I'm playing these two notes, 8th right here and here, with our 3rd finger, having our fingers on this angle pointing towards the picking hand shoulder, and. And I'm moving back into this position so we can play this note here. And that just enables us to use the string bending techniques that we're going to be looking at a little later in this course. Now there are 5 positions of this minor pentatonic scale in total, and we've just covered position 1. So this is important to know that this is the same notes that exist elsewhere on the neck, and we've just learnt uh 2 octaves of this scale in one position. Now we can learn further notes higher and lower than those two octaves, so add more. Available to us just by learning a little bit of uh position 5, and the higher notes from position 2, and learning how to transfer between them um is much more usable to be able to have a lot more notes available to you than learning all five positions from 1 to 5 in order, in my opinion. Uh, it's just a more practical thing that is how solos are learned, and there's a reason for it, which is we, we will cover in due course. But we're gonna start off by learning a lower extension, more commonly done in rock riffs, uh, you know, by Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin. But where we would start here. Is rather than at the 5th fret, we start at the 3rd fret with our 1st finger. And we would go from 3rd fret to 5th fret. Now that 5th fret is still the root note of this scale, but we're just playing it using different fingers so we have access to this lower part of the neck. And this is position 1, and we're going lower than this now. Then from there we're going to play all the same notes of this scale, but we're playing one of them in a different note location. This is the 3rd fret of the 5th string. And this is the same note as the 8th fret on string 5, they're both a C. So if I do this. It sounds the same. There's this, playing here just gives us access to the lower notes. Now what we want to do now is move back into position one and we do that with a slide. From 5th fret to 7th fret on that 5th string. Straight away by using that slide, it sounds a lot more like lead guitar or or the riffs that we we commonly hear in in electric guitar music and rock music, but. We want to make sure that we're sliding with that 3rd finger just as we learn this to keep everything the same every time that we practise it. We don't want to do it different ways when we're practising, otherwise you won't improve as much as you could. So 1st, 3rd. 3rd finger and slide in that 3rd finger to 7th threat. From there until string 3, it is exactly the same as position 1, we're just using position 1 notes. Until string 3 and 7th fret. And we'll play that with the 3rd finger. From here, we're going to slide from this 7th fret to 9th fret. And we do that just by keeping the same pressure down, pick it and slide up to 9 fret. And then we're now in position 2 of the uh minor pentatonic scale. Of the same scale we were doing, we've moved from position 1 to position 2. See, it's not that scary when we learn it in this fashion, is it? And we're going to play the higher notes of position 2 and. This is starting with the 9th fret. And then we use 8 and 10. And 8 and 10 again. Now, The shape of the minor pentatonic position one, the, you know, the dots in align and and the the shape of that should be very familiar to you now, but when we move out of that scale shape, it will be less familiar and a little bit more scary to find where you are. So how I like to think about this top of position too is kind of like a house. Stay with me. We have the roof. The roof of the house here forming this triangle shape. And then the bricks or or the uh sort of main rooms of the house in this square shape here. So it's kind of like a triangle and a square underneath it. And that is what we call one box shape and is commonly referred to as the BB King box, because a lot of uh BB King Solos. Just use those 5 notes and and can stick there an awful lot. Um, but let's have a recap from the lowest note, from that lower extension, adding in this higher extension into the position 2. the full tab is available um in the guidebook that comes with this course. Starting from 3rd fret. 3 to 5. Next string, 3. To 5. Slide to 7. 5 7. 5, this is all just normal minor pentatonic. 7, so still position 1. Sliding to 9, suddenly in position 2. And the higher notes of position 2, the thinner strings of position 2. After 9, it's 8 and 10 for the remaining notes. 8 and 10. 8 and 10. Coming back down is just the exact reverse of that, so we have 10 and 8. 10. 8. 9 will do with the 3rd finger again. So that's what we did coming up. Then we slide to 7. 1st finger at 5th. 757. Slide to 5. Down to 3 5 and 3 to finish off with. And to complete this, we want to be practising this in the following fashion, ideally with what we call alternate picking, picking each note with a down pick and then the next note with an up pick alternately no matter what note is played in the whole sequence. As follows. To finish with, it can sound better to finish on 7th fret. But that is not needed. What's important is we get the concept that we have added lower pitched notes and higher pitched notes, but no more letters. This isn't a different scale, it's just an extension of the same scale. Um. It will be the higher extension that we'll be using more in this course. Not every time, not too often, we're mainly gonna be using position one, but just so you're all really familiar with these common extensions when they are used in the licks that we learn at the end of this course. Uh that's the end of this lesson, let's move on now.