
Don’t be a prisoner of the pentatonic box. Time to break out!
Beginner
Beginner
• Create blazing pentatonic licks that span the entire neck.
• Understand how to move a motif through the scale.
• Learn how to develop variations on simple licks.
Let’s start with a simple idea in Ex. 1. It consists of four sixteenth-notes from the A minor pentatonic scale (A–C–D–E–G) in the 5th position. Once you get this phrase under your fingers, the rest of the lesson will come together nicely. The picking I use for this lick is a downstroke followed by a pull-off, another downstroke, and then one upstroke. I’ve seen many people start with an upstroke and change it up. It’s your call.
Now that you have the idea let’s break out and head up the neck. In Ex. 2, we move to the 8th position. If you want to think in terms of the pentatonic scale, we are moving each note in the motif up to the next available scale tone, with the same picking pattern. Put the two ideas together and start playing them two times each. We are going to keep going up.
Ex. 3 is based out of the 10th position and begins with a C on the 2nd string. Experiment with fingerings on each one of these. It helps to have a few different ways to come in and out of each escape route.
For Ex. 4, Ex. 5, and Ex. 6 we continue up the pentatonic scale. Learn how to visualize the scale that surrounds each fragment—it will help considerably when putting these into practice. Also, notice that Ex. 6 feels very familiar. It’s our original motif transposed up an octave.
Now it’s time to put everything we’ve learned so far together. In Ex. 7, I’ve written out a longer lick that connects each of our previous examples. As you can hear in the audio, I’ve taken liberties with the phrasing by ghosting some notes and palm-muting others. These come out naturally in my playing, but find the ideas and concepts that pop out in your playing and lean into them. That’s a major step in finding your own sound.
You’ve now made it through five different escape routes moving through five positions of the A minor pentatonic scale. In the heat of a gig you can pull any one of these out as a “repeater” that works up the crowd (think of all those fast licks in “Freebird”) or as a way to seamlessly transition to a different pentatonic box.
I altered our original motivic pattern for Ex. 8. I took our exact phrase from Ex. 1 and expanded it on the second repeat by reaching up and grabbing the A with my pinky. Yes, it’s a stretch, but it allows you to squeeze yet another variation out of this lick. Don’t worry, when you try this out with the previous licks it’s a bit easier since the frets are closer together.
Now, imagine you’re stepping out front to rip a dozen or so choruses on an over-caffeinated version of “Train Kept A-Rollin’” when you bust out Ex. 9, which is simply a “repeater” version of Ex. 8. And the crowd goes wild.
These have been heard in everything from Southern rock to metal and nearly everything in between. Make sure to practice these evenly with a metronome and experiment with them on other string sets and in other keys. Escaping from the box is something we all need to do at various points in our journey. Use this newfound freedom for good. You’ll be glad you did!
It’s almost over, but there’s still time to win! Enter Stompboxtober Day 30 for your shot at today’s pedal from SoloDallas!
The Schaffer Replica: Storm
The Schaffer Replica Storm is an all-analog combination of Optical Limiter+Harmonic Clipping Circuit+EQ Expansion+Boost+Line Buffer derived from a 70s wireless unit AC/DC and others used as an effect. Over 50 pros use this unique device to achieve percussive attack, copious harmonics and singing sustain.
Does the guitar’s design encourage sonic exploration more than sight reading?
A popular song between 1910 and 1920 would usually sell millions of copies of sheet music annually. The world population was roughly 25 percent of what it is today, so imagine those sales would be four or five times larger in an alternate-reality 2024. My father is 88, but even with his generation, friends and family would routinely gather around a piano and play and sing their way through a stack of songbooks. (This still happens at my dad’s house every time I’m there.)
Back in their day, recordings of music were a way to promote sheet music. Labels released recordings only after sheet-music sales slowed down on a particular song. That means that until recently, a large section of society not only knew how to read music well, but they did it often—not as often as we stare at our phones, but it was a primary part of home entertainment. By today’s standards, written music feels like a dead language. Music is probably the most common language on Earth, yet I bet it has the highest illiteracy rate.
Developed specifically for Tyler Bryant, the Black Magick Reverb TB is the high-power version of Supro's flagship 1x12 combo amplifier.
At the heart of this all-tube amp is a matched pair of military-grade Sovtek 5881 power tubes configured to deliver 35-Watts of pure Class A power. In addition to the upgraded power section, the Black Magick Reverb TB also features a “bright cap” modification on Channel 1, providing extra sparkle and added versatility when blended with the original Black Magick preamp on Channel 2.
The two complementary channels are summed in parallel and fed into a 2-band EQ followed by tube-driven spring reverb and tremolo effects plus a master volume to tame the output as needed. This unique, signature variant of the Black Magick Reverb is dressed in elegant Black Scandia tolex and comes loaded with a custom-built Supro BD12 speaker made by Celestion.
Price: $1,699.
Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine is one of the loudest guitarists around. And he puts his volume to work creating mythical tones that have captured so many of our imaginations, including our special shoegaze correspondent, guitarist and pedal-maestro Andy Pitcher, who is our guest today.
My Bloody Valentine has a short discography made up of just a few albums and EPs that span decades. Meticulous as he seems to be, Shields creates texture out of his layers of tracks and loops and fuzz throughout, creating a music that needs to be felt as much as it needs to be heard.
We go to the ultimate source as Billy Corgan leaves us a message about how it felt to hear those sounds in the pre-internet days, when rather than pull up a YouTube clip, your imagination would have to guide you toward a tone.
But not everyone is an MBV fan, so this conversation is part superfan hype and part debate. We can all agree Kevin Shields is a guitarists you should know, but we can’t all agree what to do with that information.