- This topic has 5 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 2 years, 2 months ago by .
-
Topic
-
Hi,
In a recent comment here, charjo mentions Brian’s allusion to the fact that on the V chord you can generally move up 2 frets and repeat whatever lick you just played over the I chord.
In fact, this touches upon the huge and fascinating topic of higher chord extensions.
Let’s assume we are playing lead over a blues in A, using the good ol’ Am pentatonic.
The V chord is E7 = (E G# B D).
If we move the Am pentatonic (whatever shape) up to frets, we get the Bm pentatonic whose notes are: B D E F# AComparing the notes of this scale with the chord tones of E7, we find that:
– we have the root E
– we have the 5th B
– we have the 7th D
– and we add the 9th (F#) and the 11th (A)So by sliding our home pentatonic shape up two frets, we essentially spell out a V7(9,11) chord! (We don’t have the 3rd, but that chord tone is most certainly played by the band).
Interestingly, you could make do with only that Bm pentatonic over all three chords of your 12 bar blues!
a) Over the I7 (A7) chord (A C# E G) the scale B D E F# A spells out the 6th, the 9th and the 11th.
b) over the IV7 chord (D7) the scale B D E F# A spells out the 6th and the 9th.So, the next time you improvise over a 12 bar blues, just play the pentatonic scale rooted two frets higher than the tonic of that song, and see what happens…
Granted, you’ll be sounding rather jazzy… but why not?The reason this works is because the 7th chords of a blues progression don’t actually resolve ( they don’t have a dominant function). Some people say they are “static” or “stationary”. On a regular V – I or II – V – I cadence this trick will probably not work so well…
There are many more such pentatonic tricks, but let’s keep this post reasonably short 😉
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.