What may seem like backwards thinking is sometimes forward motion. One of the biggest concerns you probably have when learning to play the guitar is: Where do my fingers go?
Though finger placement is the most important thing to acheive, in order to attain it we need to set it as the longterm goal, and focus on the notes and the steps that link them together. If we just look at finger placement, we will be able to play songs we like, and even come close to the original sounds, but we will not be able to take what we have learned and play outside of the songs we have memorized.
When you buy a book at the store to help you learn guitar, you get pages of prebuilt chords. This is great for learning to play fast, but it also makes your mind see the rest of the neck as blank. If we progress past the first 3 frets and move on to bar-chords, or power chords, we then grow aware of the other sounds further up the neck, but we only gain bits and pieces of knowledge. I think this is because we have learned chords first, so naturally we expect chords to answer our questions. I suggest we diminish our reliance on chords and see the scale as being the dominate factor in music, because it is whether we admit it or not.
On the typical neck shown in books you would see the chord as the start, but as you can see, although I start at the chord, I have placed the chord in the distance and made the scale the dominate area, because the scale builds the chords. This I am calling the inverted neck, just because I have taken the normal and turned it around.
As I have mentioned before there is a disconnect between chords and scales, but there is also a disconnect between singing and riffing (playing lead guitar). How many notes do you sing at a time? Hopefully you have landed on the answer of one, if not you have two heads, have two voice boxes or you are just that good! Playing lead and singing are closely linked especially if we look at skatt in Jazz. For example: Skiddli, Skattli Diddli, Doo; could be seen as A, B, D, E on a scale. If you have a good ear for music you do some stuff automatically. When you strum a C chord your mind tells you that you can sing a C an E or a G note and still sound in key but when it comes to playing riffs it becomes a little more difficult. Why? Let me crunch the numbers.
The moment you take your fingers off the neck, the chances of finding the right notes at the right time haphazardly is almost impossible. Just by using the first 13 frets you get 13 notes on each string, multiply that by 6, because that is how many strings there are, you get 78 notes. If you own a cutaway and you can reach up to the 15th fret you get a total of 90 notes. I say good luck. Without scales it is like shooting in the dark. Granted some notes are duplicates just an octave above or below, but still there is nothing like fumbling for a spot to play on the neck when you need to have a definite location.
I can remember a time before I saw the need for scales when I removed my hands off of the C chord and attempted to play something cool while my friend continued to play the chords of the song. I felt like the neck suddenly grew a couple extra feet and that my fingers were forced to brave the note minefield, praying that I would find a good sound and not explode with an out of key BOMB! I do not remember how I did, I think I blocked it out of my mind, so I am assuming it wasn't the best.
Finding the 135 in Scales
The scales show us where to play, but not how to play with our accompaniment; in this part we will look at what to play and when to play it. Last time I talked about chord building with the 135 formula and that will be our base for this lesson. This formula allows you to build the major chords on the guitar. Let us look at the C scale: CDEFGABC. The 135 in this is CEG your goal when riffing around with the C chord is to play those notes the most and for the longest times. To do this you first need to split the notes in the scale into three groups: Root note, Harmonizing notes, Traversal notes. The root is the note that gives the chord definition, in this case it is the C note. The Harmonizing notes are E and G they make the chord sound full but do not alter the tone. Like if you sing harmony with someone, one person sings the lead or melody and the other can choose to sing a 3rd above or a 5th above. If you can find a 3rd person then you could cover all of the parts, luckily on the guitar these 3 notes are just a finger's stretch away.
The final group are the most cool; in my opinion, they make you look good. A quick travel up the neck to G can tell an audience you are in control of your instrument--this effect works because the notes not being played in the C chord DFAB still exist, their sounds are still relevant. Do not stay on them for very long, however, just use them to help you get to where you are going.
Counting the Steps
The best way to learn this is to slow everything down and break down my first step formula
(2+1, 3+1) into manageable bits like this. Using the C scale:
C D E F G A B C
2+1 3+1
(1+1) (.5+1) (1+1+.5)
Here is what it is: Start at C move up two whole steps and stop you are at E, but you have used D to get there. Then go .5(1/2 step) plus a whole step and stop you are at G. Moving on with whole step, whole step, half step you have reached the octave. You want to think about it as 2 stop, 1/2+1 stop, 2+1/2 Stop. In essence you are doing a 1351 (CEGC) on the scale. So when someone is playing a C chord you can count your new steps to find the notes to stop on and use the others to show off with. I admit with this concept you would be changing scales each time someone played a new chord, and that is not practical, but this is only the start. Now go on and make those strings sing!
On a side note: the power chord or rock chord uses a 151 formula making it CGC, if you put your fingers in that position, they are in perfect form for making the 1351 easy, just let off of the fifth with your ring finger and pick up the 3rd with your index finger.
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