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Hi Active Melody family!
It’s time for the October, 2025 Site Member Challenge
This month’s challenge is about playing an entire lead by staying in only one position of the fretboard, and limiting your scales to the Minor and Major Pentatonic scales. The position you choose should be one of the CAGED System positions, you can choose any of them.
You can use this lesson (EP621) as a guide for how to do this and can even play this one verbatim if you aren’t comfortable improvising yet. In this lesson I stayed in the E position from CAGED, you can choose to do the same or play out of any of the other positions.
As for what jam track to play over, feel free to use ANY of the jam tracks from ActiveMelody (major or minor key).
Here’s a lesson I did many years ago that has a 1-4-5 Blues in all 12 keys, so that might make finding a jam track easier, but do not feel like you have to use one of these.
Even though you will be tempted to play something outside of a single chord shape, don’t do it! Limit yourself and discover something new!
The submission date for this challenge will be Sunday, November 9 – you can start submitting Friday, November 7
**If you need assistance with how to record yourself and post to the forum see this post**
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GROUND RULES FOR PARTICIPATION:
1. Post your Youtube, Vimeo, or Soundcloud links of you playing your chosen lesson anytime between Friday, November 7, through Sunday, November 9, 10:00 pm CST. Please do not submit earlier. I think it is fun to see everyone’s posts at once.
2. Submit individually in the “Active Melody Member Challenge Response Submissions” forum. Title your posts “October 2025 Challenge Response – [Your AM Screen Name]”
3. Please submit only a single video or audio file for this challenge.
4. Have fun and don’t be intimidated by these challenges!!! Use these challenges to help you set goals and complete them by a deadline. You can also use this as an opportunity to chat with your fellow Active Melody members and share tips or tricks on this challenge that you think are useful.
5. In my opinion, it is better to show progress versus perfection with these challenges. So if you are a beginner and can only play the first couple of measures. That is completely ok. If you play two more measures of the next challenge piece than you did the previous one, you are on track to getting better. This is what these challenges are about…you learning guitar and getting better. Remember we are all here to support you no matter what your current playing level is.
I look forward to seeing everyone’s posts! 🙂
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You can use this lesson (EP621) as a guide for how to do this and can even play this one verbatim if you aren’t comfortable improvising yet.
Cool challenge 🙂 There seems to be so many cool licks to steal in EP621 that the choice is hard.
Both options are good, but I’m curious. What will you guys choose : learn the piece as is or improvise a new one ?
Personally, I feel like I worked really hard on my improvisation last month, so I think I deserve to have some fun learning a piece that’s just enjoyable to play. There’s something magical about this lead — it reminds me of one of my favorite blues artists, Jack Ruch. It’s like singing with your fingers.
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Hi Mathieu,
I was thinking it would be an opportunity to work in a position other than box 1, probably box 4 and to attempt different ways of approaching a 12 bar major blues, ie. in the key, minor pentatonic, mixed major/minor, following the changes, some outside lines, etc. within that limitation.
EP 621 is definitely a great lesson to get under your fingers, though.
John -
Hi John,
Indeed, it would be a great opportunity to play in box 4, a position I’m less familiar with than my usual box 1 stuff. I think that a good approach for me would be to split my time in half this month. Instead of going all-in on EP621, maybe split my practice time in half ! Makes senses, thanks !
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