Sally Cinnamon - Rolling Stones

In this video I'm checking out how to play the G major scale and a super fantastic lead line by The Stone Roses - the lead line from "Sally Cinnamon." I'm not sure how much people all over the world are aware of The Stone Roses, but they're a huge band in England from Manchester, and they have so many songs with simple, fantastic melodies played on electric guitar. I highly recommend you check out some Stone Roses songs.

Understanding the Scale

The key of this song is G, and the main other chord is C. The open G string is the first note of this riff and also of the G major scale. The scale puts things in essentially alphabetical order, but the musical alphabet. We do want to learn that musical alphabet as well as learning the riffs and lead lines. We want to think about this as the scale being the ABCs, and riffs and lead lines being words, phrases, sentences. This is how we learn to make our guitar talk and sing.

Five Notes from the Scale

I'm just going to look at five notes from it. Pick that open string three, then put our middle finger at the second fret also on string three. Then we're going to go open, first fret, third fret on string two. Pick the open string, first fret, and third fret. In total that gives us one, two, three, four, five. In many parts of the world this is commonly sung as do-re-mi-fa-sol. That sound is really important - we want that major scale sound because then it enables us to play and get our heads around simple, awesome riffs.

The Lead Line

That lead line uses the same start note string three, then goes to the highest note, comes down the same set of notes we learned in the scale, and then just walks about within those notes. Which is exactly what good riffs and melodies do. That's such an important thing to get, because throughout this series I never try and just teach a technique or a scale in isolation - let's apply it to real music and make it have far-reaching consequences way beyond just learning one riff or song. That melody is the open third string to the highest note we played before (D note at fret three string two played by third finger), fingers on this angle with thumb over the top.

Practice Balance

Because this one is a little bit quicker than other things we've done so far, we really want to be doing a balance between practicing that scale and then practicing the riff. To get faster, you need to be able to play the notes in order before we start mixing them up a bit. A lot of people don't see the benefit of learning scales because it's boring or they don't see how it applies to real music. Here I'm showing you how it applies, and we need to be able to get consistent even notes going up and coming down. Make sure your practice does both evenly. Once you've got those notes under your fingers, join in with me to the looper pedal at 50% tempo and 75%.