IN THE WOODSHED
Charlie Griffiths says give your fingers and brain a stretch and expand your Pentatonic potential with these wide-reaching licks!
Charlie Griffiths brings you five great licks using three-notes-per-string Pentatonics.
The Minor Pentatonic scale is infinitely useful and versatile. The scale positions are usually seen as two-notes-per-string entities, but this month we will explore some three-notes-per-string ideas. Since the scale is all tones and Minor 3rd stretches, this might be a strain on for your fretting hand. So be sure to thoroughly warm up your muscles and loosen up before trying these examples. We are sticking with E Minor Pentatonic: E-G-A-B-D (1 b3 45 b7), to make finding the notes on the fretboard much simpler, as some of these ideas will be unusual compared to our familiar ‘five shapes’ system.
We start up at the 12th fret with a Dimebag Darrell-esque lick which ifeatures shapes 1 and 2 glued together. To ease into this, you could start by playing shape 1 using first, second and third fingers only. You will benefit greatly from developing the space between these fingers; particularly first and second. Next try playing the second two-notes-perstring shape with second, third and fourth fingers only, in order to develop control and independence between the third and fourth fingers. Now stick both shapes together for the full three-notes-per-string scale.
In Ex1 that there are repeated notes wherever a string change occurs. If you want to avoid this, Frank Gambale is your man. Frank’s reinvention of speed picking is still at the cutting edge of guitar technique. Example 2 shows the Gambale picking approach through the Em Pentatonic shapes seen in Ex1. Here we are alternating between three-notes and one-note-per-string. The Gambale rule is that whenever you have odd numbers of notes per string, you can sweep pick the string changes. So each ascending string change is a downward sweep and each descending string change is an upward sweep. This results in a beautifully smooth and fluid sounding Pentatonic sound more akin to saxophone or synth players than guitarists.
Example 3 is something Allan Holdsworth might have used; it’s a legato shape that uses the entire range of the fretboard from the open sixth string right up to the 24th fret E on the first. In between those two notes is a set of three-notes-per-string shapes which move from string to string with even hammer-ons.
For Example 4 we turn to Paul Gilbert with a pattern he made famous with Mr Big’s Colorado Bulldog. Here we stay on the middle two strings and ascend the neck with six-note groupings. It’s a great way to play Minor Pentatonic with a razor sharp picking attack.
Finally we look at a three-notes-per-string shape played from the 7th fret fifth-string root. This Richie Kotzen style lick uses legato and fourth-finger finger rolls used to throw in some very cool 4th interval jumps.
Play through each example very slowly and carefully at first, and make sure the notes sound clean and even before speeding up and playing along with the backing tracks.
NEXT MONTH Charlie goes prog as he looks at mastering the tricky 9/8 time signature