-
Making Music With The Minor Pentatonic Scale
You’ve probably heard about the minor pentatonic scale from other guitar players and may even know the main pattern for it (see below) but may not know how to apply to songs you’re playing. If this is you read on to learn how to make music with the minor pentatonic scale.
Watch the A Minor Pentatonic Scale & Moving the Pentatonic Pattern video lesson.
The minor pentatonic scale is a 5 note scale used in the blues, rock and many other styles of music including folk, soul and jazz. In the blues and rock music it is used for the melody, riffs and solos.
The cool thing about the minor pentatonic scale is that is an easy scale to play on the guitar. The main pattern used for the scale on the guitar is easy to play and remember. Read More -
12 Bar Blues, Rock n Roll & I IV V
In the post What do I IV V (1 4 5) chords mean and why should you care? we learnt how I IV V chord harmony works, what songs they’re used in and how to transpose songs between keys. Now we’re going one step further down this path and looking at how the I IV V chords relate to Blues and Rock n Roll.
There are thousands of Blues and Rock n Roll songs using I IV V chords and something called the 12 Bar Blues. The 12 Bar Blues is a 12 bar song structure that looks like the diagram below.In the key of A it translates to the following chords. To give this a more “bluesy” flavour try playing all chords as (dominant) 7th chords. Read More
-
What are I IV V (1 4 5) Chords and Why Should You Care?
If you hang around musicians for long enough you’ll start to hear them talking about numbers and in particular the chord numbers 1 (I) 4 (IV) and 5 (V). You may be wondering what they mean as you may know the chords A D and E but don’t know how to play I IV or V chords.
The numbers I IV and V come from a musical relationship called harmony. It might not sound very cool but music is based on maths. If you can get your head wrapped around some of this math learning songs and writing your own songs can be easy and less mysterious.
The numbers I IV and V refer to the 3 main chords used in many blues, rock/pop songs and how they’re related to each other and work together. Read More
