Overview of The C Chord Family – Lesson 21

So as you can see, the Pentatonic scale is pure magic! This one scale works over an entire family of chords and as a beginner and even an advanced player a lot of times, spending as little time possible thinking about a bunch of different scales that work over a chord progression is important to allow for creativity and flow. Nothing will take you outta the game more than overthinking and overworking.

So in my previous lesson tips about chords, I talked about creating riffs, or embellishments, to spice up your chords and strumming. Well now it's time to take this concept and apply it to scales you will begin to learn and make little melodic "motifs" and interesting patterns within them. Instead of being called riffs tho, they are called "licks" as Papa Gates mentioned in the video.

Every great and even decent player has a certain sized bag of tricks that they pull from. When it comes to soloing or lead guitar, we transcribe licks either from our own creation or from other players we want to sound like. It's important however, if you take from other players, to change up their licks a little bit and make them "your own". Good players sound like other players but GREAT players sound like themselves and I promise that even they work diligently on this. Be sure to record these on a phone or recording device because I PROMISE YOU, if you do not take the time to do this, you WILL forget them.

Upload a video of yourself in the "Discussion Thread" playing a Lick you've transcribed from someone and then rewrite it a little to make it your own and play that as well!