Lesson #110 Exercises for Speed

In this lesson we are looking at some simple minor pentatonic exercises to help imrpove our speed when soloing. 

Find the TAB here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_WwAzYBpLKQBRAz942uqQb4u-C3PcvYz?usp=drive_link

To become a MEMBER and get access to over 2 Years of guitar lessons for just $5/Month head to https://www.buzzsprout.com/950998/subscribe

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:46

Hello and welcome to lesson 110 of the Blues Guitar Show Plus membership. Cheers to you guys as always for being here. Thank you for being a subscriber. I hope you're finding these lessons useful for your everyday guitar playing. Today we are going back into the improvisation world, sort of. What we're going to talk about is the minor pentatonic scale and how we can use a couple of different exercises this week to improve on our speed playing. Now, I kind of hear you saying, oh, but speed playing, that's not, you know, we're playing blues. You don't need to worry about playing fast and all that. And I totally hear you and I 100% agree. We're not playing metal. We're not looking for this kind of like ying way, you know, all that kind of stuff. But being able to have some of that speed improvement helps allow you to be more diverse with your rhythms. So when we're improvising, this is something that comes up time and time again with my students is that there's this kind of hyper focus on what we're playing with our fretting hand i.e you know can we get all the way up and down the neck and that stuff is all really important kind of playing scales all over the neck and being able to kind of move fluidly from point a to point b on the next all really important but it's important as well not to hyper focus on that because the whole other side of your lead playing is the rhythmic element and the Some of the best solos in the world don't actually have that many notes in them, but it's the rhythm that makes you remember. You know, I'm thinking if I play this solo... You know, it's something like Comfortably Numb, not a huge amount of notes in it, but it's all about that rhythm. Similarly to things like... You know, you can sing these solos and it's because of the rhythm mostly is why you can sing them. So focusing on our rhythm, if we're playing something that's kind of faster, like a kind of Texas blues. The problem with not being able to kind of play a little bit faster is you get very stuck into this idea where you can do like, well, one note per bar. One, two, three, four. You can do two. One, two, three, four. You can do four. One, two, three, four. Or you can do... You know, one and two and three and four. And maybe you can even do the one and a two and a three and a four and a. But if you can't do the one and a two and a three and a four and a. then you become a little bit limited to kind of the slower end of the rhythm spectrum, you know, your kind of whole note, half note, quarter note, maybe eighth notes. So these exercises are really, really useful for improving on your speed, but with both hands, and that's the key, is that a lot of people start to improve the speed with their fretting hand, so they can kind of do a lot of hammer on, pull off. You know, or whatever. But they kind of fail to do that with their picking hand. So today we're going to be using a flat pick, we're going to be using a pick... and this is going to be done using alternate picking but it's a really good exercise for just improving some of that speed and getting to grips with the alternate picking and if you're kind of thinking oh I'm more you know into the acoustic blues stuff and the acoustic blues world this is totally applicable to that especially if you ever want to play things like bluegrass that's full of these kind of fast you know fast kind of licks um so exactly the same idea so you'll find in your tab folder for this week you'll find one tab that's got two lines And we're doing this over an A minor 7, and it's using position 1 of the A minor pentatonic. It's something that I think we all already know, and kind of very much have got to grips with, which is cool. And we're going to start with this exercise.

UNKNOWN: 0:46

...

SPEAKER_01: 4:45

That's the first line. So you can kind of hear that we're not starting on the root, right? We're not starting on the A. We're starting on the D. And we're climbing down and then going back up. So we're going to do groups of three is the way that I would think about this. So we're going to start on fret five on the A string. Then go up a string, eight, five on the E string. And then we're going to do the next three along, if that makes sense. So what we're going to do is move from this fret five that we were starting on to fret seven. And we're going to do the three... backwards from fret seven, which would be seven, five, eight on the sixth string. So that's... And really important to make sure with your pick, you are always playing down and up as much as possible. So we're gonna start with this. That's your kind of first... If we do the first bar, we're gonna go five, so D on the A string, five, eight, five on the E string, next one, five on the A string, down to eight, up to fret five on the G string, and then fret seven on the A. So that's five, eight, five, seven, five, eight, five, seven. So one, and two, and three, and four, and one, and two, and three, and four, and. Okay, so again, I'm gonna read out the notes now. D, C, A, E, D, C, G, E. So you can kind of see what the pattern is. We're going to start on the fourth fret five, and then go up two notes, and then it's backwards one, and then up two notes, backwards one, up two notes. All together, that would be... So it's a working of the minor pentatonic scale, just a position one, but we're just starting with this pattern where we're going to go... And start building it up till we get down to that... And then the second half of this exercise is exactly the same thing, but we're starting on the fret 8 on the B string and going up. And backwards a note in the scale. So it's... Well, I think the ending actually... just to end it, this exercise. When we get up to that fret eight on the top string, we go down the string five, seven, five, back on the top string, eight, five. So that's second half. And again, just make sure we have that nice alternate picking. Okay, so from the top, that would be from, this is both parts together. second half so it's less about the exact thing that we're playing with this exercise although this one is a really really good one so make sure you head over to that tab folder and really try and dig into this one and get it under your fingers but it's about this giving us the ability to kind of have those runs to give us that kind of extra little bit of speed and because it's all position one it's nice and easy to kind of get to grips with what we're doing in terms of notes on the fretboard so this time we're not thinking about notes on the fretboard we're just thinking about our picking and trying to get some of that speed up all right i hope that was useful have a go at that exercise this week and i'll catch you at the same time next week