Lesson #113, Harmonizing with the Pentatonic Scale II

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Lesson #113, Harmonizing with the Pentatonic Scale II

Hi Everybody,

Keeping with the harmonizations of the pentatonic scale, lets play some three note harmonies now. You can see and hear from the video that adding one more note to make triads up and down the neck with this scale will help in hearing things in different ways, and will definelty help you to understand the fretboard and have a better understanding of improvisation when you get to that point in your playing.

Remember you can pick out any notes you want from a mode and apply the same degrees to any of the other modes. I would encourage you to do alot of exploration with these modes on your own. I will be offering my own ideas along the course of future lessons as well, to help you along, but exploring on your own will bring out your individual styles, and that is one of the coolest things about music.

You can also explore the pentatonic scale within the Scruggs, Keith/Thomspon and Single String styles. You can hear in the video that by playing this scale with a Keith/Thompson approach will bring out yet more ways to explore the fingerboard. I know it may seem like a lot of work, but try to keep it all fun, and try to keep it exciting by exploring the different sounds you can get from the five string banjo. By exploring the fretboard in this way, you may just find yourself playing some cool things in your next jam without even realizing it!

In the next videos we will pick apart the song Cumberland Gap, and explore some of the ways we can use these techniques and studies of the Pentatonic scale in the Scruggs style.

Keep them fingers rollin everyone, and as always, Rock On!

David