CREATIVE ROCK
Shaun Baxter looks at using major and minor 2nds in this month’s Creative Rock column.
Over the next few issues, we’re going to look at ways of developing some medium-paced ideas to fit in with your Mixolydian vocabulary. To do this we’ll be using various intervals, such as 2nds, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, 7ths and octaves.
If you were asked to give an ideal blend between slow, medium and fast ideas for a well-balanced rock guitar solo, what would it be? 25% slow, 50% medium-paced and 25% fast? Even if you think that they should be evenly spread, the fact is that most self-taught rock guitarists do not play like that: especially metal players. Many heavy rockers switch between one extreme to another: that is, interesting ways of playing slow notes (such as using a whammy bar dive bomb, or a pinched harmonic) and various ways of shredding at high speed (such as legato, sweep picking, tapping etc), leaving the remaining and all-important middle ground relatively undeveloped.
In Western music, most of your mediumpaced ideas will feature rhythmic subdivisions of three or four. For example, if you are playing a shuffle blues, most of your mediumpaced ideas will be based around eighth-note triplets, whereas, when playing over a funky backing track, 16th notes will be more appropriate; consequently, it’s a good idea to categorise your vocabulary accordingly. In other words, ideas mainly comprising triplet rhythms (such as eighth-note and 16th-note triplets) or duple rhythms (such as eighth notes and 16th notes).
Intervals are a great way of developing approaches that have distinct flavours. Each interval type has its own innate flavour, and this is something that we can use to our advantage in order to control the musical complexion of what we do when improvising.
For example, 4ths and 5ths sound quite hard and modern, whereas 3rds and 6ths sound softer, poppier and often country-tinged.
In this lesson, we start off by looking at 2nds. These come in two types:
• Minor 2nd = one semitone. • Major 2nd = two semitones (ie whole tone).
Within any of the modes of the Major scale, a 2nd describes the distance from one scale note to its neighbour. For example, if you look at Diagram 1, which represents the notes of A Mixolydian (or any other of the modes in the key of D) you’ll see how each note is either a semitone (minor 2nd) or a tone (major 2nd) apart from its neighbouring note as you move either clockwise or anticlockwise around the circular scheme.
For this series, the object will be to build up a variety of interval-based approaches over the same backing track using A Mixolydian in conjunction with the A Minor Blues scale. Bear in mind that, once you’ve studied the musical examples in this lesson and experimented with your own ideas, you can also produce equivalent ideas for A Dorian simply by replacing any C# notes (major 3rd of A) with C notes (minor 3rd of A) instead, as Dorian is like Mixolydian with a minor 3rd instead of a major 3rd.
The idea behind this series is to get you thinking of how the basic concept of each lesson (we’ve been applying all our ideas to Mixolydian) can be shifted to any other scale you know. So once you have absorbed the various concepts studied here, aim to apply the same principles to the other scales that you know in order to develop useful repertoire that you can draw upon when improvising.
once you’ve absorbed the concepts studied here, apply the same principles to other scales that you know