Four Note Patterns For Technique & Improvisation

How's it going guys? Welcome to lesson 4 in this free lead guitar course, where we're looking at how to play lead guitar solos using the major scale. Now in the previous lesson, we looked at a major pattern of 3 notes, so the major scale, going up 3 notes, back 13 notes, back 1. Great for melodies, and this is a very similar lesson, but we're looking at a pattern of 4. So we're going up 4 notes, then starting. From note 2, going up 4 notes, start from note 34 notes, and uh it sounds really beautiful, this one's fantastic for melody writing. Let's get straight in for a close up and show you what we're going for. Remember the tab for all of these lessons and an e-book for everything that we're covering in this course as a guide is available from the website andyguitar.co.uk. The link's in the description as always. So here's the close-up on the 4 note pattern, again starting from a C note, though remember if we wanted to play this using the D major scale, we'd just start from the D note at 10 frets. Um, but we're gonna keep everything in C for now because that's what the first couple of backing tracks are. Those backing tracks are entirely for free at Andyguitar.co.uk as part of this major scale lead guitar series. And you can learn more about that by clicking on the website just here or in the link is in the description. But we're going to go through in this pattern 4 notes and then back 1 and then play 4 notes rather than 3 that we did in the previous lesson. Lesson 44 notes, 4 note pattern. And it's major scale position one, so we start on the middle finger again, but we play 1234. We go through 4 notes. And rather than going back 1, so that we start from the second note of the scale, we need to uh go back to to the little finger rather than back 1, it's actually back 2, but it's best to think about it. 1234, and then essentially. We go 2345 if we think about it like that, so 123423453456, etc. etc. Really important to get that sound in your mind first um before you play it so that you're, you're ahead of the game and and spotting this pattern. These are called major scale patterns, so we want to spot it not only with the physical pattern with the fingers, but audibly as well. 123423. 5 5 OK, and we really want to practise it. Leaving no notes. Or leaving no spaces between any notes. But if this is the first time you've ever come across these kind of patterns and you're struggling, it's totally fine to have a pause every time that you come back cos you'll really hear that pattern of 12341234. And you know, the priority is not to make any note mistakes first of all. Um, and then, and then start to practise, you know, add little bits to your to your game each each time that we go forward. And as well as just practising it all the way through um position one. As in the previous lesson, it's really good to be able to do it for each of those three octaves, octave 1, octave 2. An octave 3 Uh, because we're playing in more areas of the neck with these sort of octave extensions, I guess we would call them. So that first, it's only twice through, which is why it's um not as important in this cause it would just be 12342345. And then we skip to the octave. 1234. 45. That was from this octave, the top of a power chord. Both of those of C notes. And then finally. From the final octave at 13 fret, 12342345. And we can see it's it's that piano idea that I've talked about before, when we move octaves, when we do it in this fashion, it feels the same to play. And it sounds the same. And we start to really understand what octaves are. Spend a bit of time learning this and it will progress your technique but also your improvisational concepts and melody writing concepts. No end, I highly advise spending a good amount of time on this.