Creating great riffs + melodies using triads

Hi There,

Thanks for reading my blogs so far.

In this blog we’ll be looking at how to add some variety to your songwriting + improvisation skills by exploring triads.

Triads are chords made up of 3 notes from a harmonized scale.

To keep things simple we’ll focus on triads from the major scale.

Let’s take a straightforward key of C major.

Using the formula TTSTTTS that gives us the notes C,D,E,F,G,A,B

Using the harmonization formula to produce triads/chords that gives us C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bdim

The intervals that make up these chords are:

Major – Root (1), Major 3rd (3) and Perfect 5th (5)

Minor – Root (1), Minor 3rd (b3) and Perfect 5th (5)

Minor 3rd = 1 1/2 tones, Major 3rd = 2 tones, Diminished 5th = 3 tones, Perfect 5th = 3 1/2 tones.

So your triads will be:

C = C, E, G

Dm = D, F, A

Em = E, G, B

F = F, A, C

G = G, B, D

Am = A, C, E

Bdim = B, D, F

If we just take the G, B and E strings we can come up with loads of combinations for these triads.

Here’s some examples:

So have a go at playing around with these and see what you can come up with. For writing songs, knowledge of triads are great as they give you lots of different options, for example:

• For creating single note melodies over chord progressions
• For adding depth to a chord progression i.e. one guitarist can play a barre chord C major while another plays a triad somewhere else on the neck
• Once you extend the triads to 7th chords that opens up more possibilities on top

Hope you’ve found this blog useful – feel free to ask any questions

You can find other great tips via the Js Music School twitter feed

@jsmusicschool @harvey_jsmusic @annie_jsmusic

Many thanks

James

 

Creating riffs and melodies using the Major Pentatonic scales

HI There,

Thanks for reading my blogs so far. Feel good about asking questions or suggesting a blog that I could write to help your guitar skills.

In previous blogs about the pentatonic scales we’ve centred mainly on the Minor pentatonic scales. The great thing about the Major pentatonic scales is that they are actually based on the same shapes as the Minor pentatonic. The difference is that shape 2 of the Minor pentatonic becomes shape 1 of the Major pentatonic. The key thing to remember here is that the key centre has changed. So they function in a different way.

The notes of Em (probably the most common minor pentatonic key) pentatonic are:

E, G, A, B and D

The notes of G major pentatonic are:

G, A, B, D and E

So as you can see the notes are the same but if you play these notes in both the orders above you can hear the difference in sound between the Em pentatonic and G major pentatonic.

In order to determine which type (minor or major) to use, this all depends on the chord progression you are playing over. (we’ll explore this in future blogs)

Here are some examples of G major pentatonic riffs – when playing them they have more of a happy, major feel to them.

Enjoy!!!

Hope you found this blog useful.

You can find other great info via the Jsmusicschool twitter feed @jsmusicschool @harvey_jsmusic @annie_jsmusic and @katie_jsmusic

Many thanks

James

 

Using double stops with the pentatonic scales – great exercise!

Hi there,

Thanks for reading my blogs – hope you’ve found them useful. Feel free to ask me via the comments or via twitter @jsmusicschool if there is something that’s bugging you that I can answer.

So whenever a new pupil comes to me for a lesson that’s been self taught for a while I ask them do they know their pentatonic scales. Many people tend to just know the first shape. If some people know all 5 shapes that is a great start. But the key to proper integration is utilising lots of different exercises so that you know them inside out and can use them properly in a musical context.

Here is 1 of many exercises to help you get to grips with the pentatonics. Double stops (playing 2 notes at a time) can give you a variety of other options for riffs alongside just single note melodies. Hundreds of famous riffs have been written with double stops. It’s also a great way of memorizing the pentatonic shapes as you are playing 2 strings at a time.

Let’s familiarize ourselves with the 5 shapes again

So in the exercise below i’ve transcribed it in the key of F#minor. So the first shape starts on the 2nd fret, 2nd shape on the 5th fret, 3rd shape on the 7th fret, 4th shape on the 9th fret and 5th shape on the 12th fret. (they connect together very easy, the 2nd note of one shape is always the first of the next)

What i’ve done below is gone ascending through each shape using double stops and then descending back down to the start again.

Remember there are 12 keys in music so you can do this exercise for all 5 shapes of all other 11 keys.

You will find that this helps to integrate the pentatonics better and you’ll be able to come up with new exciting ways of improvising.

Thanks for reading

You can find other great tweets via the Jsmusicschool twitter feed @jsmusicschool @harvey_jsmusic @annie_jsmusic

Many thanks

James

 

The Hotel from hell + Pricing your service/product.

Hi there,

Thanks for reading my blogs so far.

This blog will be slightly differ in content than all of my guitar related blogs, whereby it focuses on more about the business side of guitar teaching and how to apply this to any business.

I recently had a bad experience with a Hotel in Paris that has inspired me to write a blog. Having experienced this situation made me think more closely about customer service and business expectations. Think a negative experience like this can be turned on it’s head to prevent future occurrences.

So the little facts:

The room was 200 euros a night – so although this was Paris and an expensive city, you’d expect a fairly decent size room and decent customer service. The room was very small and nothing like on the photos from the website.

 

 

The waiter/chef that dealt with cooking and delivering the breakfast was consistency late throughout our stay and often made mistakes with the orders. This was combined with poor communication with the reception staff which meant even more mistakes.

The receptionist on the last day was very rude, argumentative and gave us a bill that was way over what we’d expected. This was due to various mistakes of the previous receptionists and waiter/chef, meaning that we had been charged extra for their incompetence.

So after having this experience I was clearer about:

Price – Being one of the most expensive teachers in Berkshire, I often get asked why i’m so expensive. So I explain that i’m in a different league to my competitors and can fully justify my prices by the following:

- excellent teaching facilities – Great valve amps, Mac with great speakers, whiteboard and utilising a wide range of interactive teaching materials like backing tracks and home made pdfs

- 6 month reviews that cater for every age and ability with clear aims, guidelines. This provides parents with feedback and gets rid of the beauracracy of weekly homework (pupils spend time on different sections of their review every week)

- Homemade transcriptions (that are produced outside of lessons) on Guitar pro that pupils can access at home for the pieces that they are learning.

- Annual school concerts with a pro backing band, free blogs, tweets, emails, dropbox access etc etc

So with the price comes expectations and this Hotel clearly did not deliver.

I’ve also realised that a local music shop (despite me sending a few of my pupils there for cheap guitar setups) was asking my pupils how much I charge. When they found out how much, they suggested a name of one of my competitors (just on the price alone!). So although I tad disappointed to hear this from my pupil (they are obviously still with me as they know i’m worth that little extra), this was a lesson in realising their whole business was positioned around cheapness. The qualities of the guitars, leads, and everything else was cheap and sub standard.

I now recommend one of the best guitar tech’s in the country who sets up Slash’s and Ronnie Wood’s guitars.

When you take this guitar to this guy, he sits you down and has a chat about your instrument and is keen to get to know you. After he’s done a stellar job on your guitar (he makes it infinitely better sounding then when it came out of the shop) he’ll provide you with a sheet explaining every single adjustment he may have made.

So ‘you get what you pay for’ isn’t always a true reflection on a service or product as we’ve seen:

- If the Hotel hired more competent staff and a waiter/chef that turned up on time then they would begin to justify their prices.

The local music shop serves a need for start up guitarists as they do offer cheap products and parents often don’t want to spend much on their child’s guitar. They will however refer you to local tutors with price just in mind. This could lead you wasting years and lots of money on a tutor that isn’t good enough. Quite a few of my pupils have come from these local competitors.

- The new guitar tech and myself charge more than our competitors but are worth it. Obviously just being expensive doesn’t necessarily mean great as we’ve seen from the Hotel.

So to conclude:

1. When looking to purchase a service or product the business should make it clear what the customer is getting. (I send out a 2 page document for every new student detailing expectations).
2. Provide some sort of discount if your service hasn’t lived up to your offering. (The Hotel should’ve offered a discount on our stay). I’ve made a few mistakes in the past (double booking, had to cancel last minute) – I rectified the situation by offering their next lesson for free.
3. Price can be misleading – The music shop offers cheap equipment, they may refer you to other cheap services that may not be of a good standard. The Hotel was over priced. The guitar tech and myself can justify our prices way beyond our competitors. Think the key here is to be clear about what you are/are not getting.

Hope you’ve found this blog useful – feel free to add any experiences of your own/suggestions for improvement!

Many thanks

James

You can find me on twitter @jsmusicschool for regular free guitar tweets

 

‘Enjoy Learning Essential Guitar’ – Jsmusicschool ethos

Hi there,

Thanks for reading my blogs so far.

In this blog I’d like to start sharing my thoughts on how IMHO guitar teaching should be taught.

For me there is too much stuff out there on the web that concentrates purely on technical ability (many advanced techniques that for me aren’t particularly useful for all genres)

When I was at college there was a huge amount of snobbery about music that didn’t have particular great guitar parts in them. Music such as Oasis and The White Stripes that (although for me have great guitar parts) were frowned upon in the guitar muso world, as they didn’t showcase fancy techniques.

From my experience at University and music college, plus from my teaching and advice from others, we have come up with a tagline that encompasses our whole way of teaching.

Enjoy – At Jsmusicschool we are constantly striving to make every aspect of the learning process enjoyable. From experience a lot of music theory is stigmatized as ‘boring’ so what I do is get people to write songs using the TTSTTTS and Maj,Min,Min,Maj,Maj,Min,Dim rules as well as integrating various strumming patterns and CAGED chords. By doing that they are using theory in an enjoyable way. When learning scales, I’ll get pupils to play and practice over songs they like to make it more enjoyable.

Learning – This is obviously a broad term but whereas school’s bombard kids these days with too much homework and content, Jsmusicschool introduces pupils to ways of ‘learning to learn’. For example learning how to separate tasks better prior to integrating them, using the power of 3 to absorb information quicker and using Neuro-linguistic programming. Jsmusicschool also uses technology in lessons, blogs, tweets, backing tracks and dropbox to further a pupils learning experience. Advice on social media is given free of charge in a world now where everyone is using it, and will be valuable for the future regardless of career choices.

Essential - We focus on the most important parts of playing the guitar and sieve out all the stuff that is not necessary (or only for really advanced players). So for example when teaching chords, we’ll go through all the basic open chords, then understand the CAGED system and all the most widely used chords in popular music. So for me Major 7, Minor7, Dominant 7 chords for your standard 7th chords. Then work on other extensions later. There are hundreds of altered and jazz type chords that kids and adults will just fall to sleep if you attempt to teach them. For me they are not ‘essential’ chords that all guitarists should learn.Scale wise I’d tend to stay away from teaching diminished and whole tone/ half tone scales as they really only cater for a small minority of musical genres. Everyone should also learn the riff for Johnny B.Goode and Sweet Child of Mine!

Refining these terms is a long term process. If anybody has any thoughts on these points feel free to add some feedback.

Many thanks

James

You can also find me on twitter @jsmusicschool

 

Counting and playing ‘off’ the beat – Quaver strumming patterns

Hi there,

Thanks for reading my blogs so far.

When you are learning strumming patterns, riffs or solo’s, it’s important that you can split up bars into segments to work out whether to play down/up strokes and whether they are on or off the beat.

Remember to count in your head or out loud + tap your feet to keep rhythm. This is important especially if you are playing off the beat, as you’ll need references to the start of each beat

I’d thoroughly recommend using a metronome regularly. This will keep pushing your playing abilities, and as a beginner there are not many better ways of forcing yourself to change chords.

Let’s remind ourselves first of a few of the symbols (you can click on the pictures for a bigger version)

The first symbol is a quaver rest (rest for 1/2 beat), second symbol is a quaver (1/2 beat), 3rd note is a crotchet (1 beat long) , 4th note is a crotchet rest (1 beat rest). The G major in the second bar is a dotted crotchet ( 1 1/2 beats long)

What we’ll do is learn basic strumming first on the beat and then off the beat:

The first bar uses crotchets and we simply play a G major chord with a downstroke on every beat.

The second bar you play off the beat on the ‘+’ so 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

The Hat sign signifies a downstroke whereas the V in the next bar shows an upstroke

Here’s our next pattern:

So here we play ( 1 + , 2, 3 +, 4)  and for the next bar ( 1 + 2, 3 + 4 )

Here’s the next pattern which mixes things up a bit more:

Here we play ( 1, 2 +, 3 + 4 + ) and then  ( 1 +, 2 +, 3 + , 4) in the next

It’s very important to count rhythm’s like the ones above especially when you have dotted crotchets that last for a beat and a half. You want to ring out that note from the ‘+’ of 3 til the end of the bar.

Now what you can also do once you’ve got grips with the above is then start to change chords at different points in the bar using down and upstrokes where appropriate.

Here’s an example of the above rhythm but with a changing chord pattern from the key of C major.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this blog and found it useful.

Feel good about asking any questions.

You can also find other great tips via my twitter feed @jsmusic

Many thanks

James

 

Improve your chord knowledge with Inversions

Hi There,

Thank you for reading my blogs so far.

This blog will provide you with insight into learning the basic essentials of chord inversions. With it you’ll be able to

1. Add lots more variety to your playing by introducing more inverted chords

2. Understand when you see something like D/F# in tab as to what it means!

3. Integrate your musical theory in more practical ways

So let’s keep it simple by just referring to Major triads/ chords

Major chords are built up of a Root note, Major 3rd (2 tones in size) + a perfect 5th (3 1/2 tones in size)

So for example D major would be D, F# and A (D – E – F# is 2 tones) ( D – E – F# – G – A is 3 1/2 tones)

A First Inversion is one where the 3rd note is played as the root note. So for example (F#, D and A would be a first inversion of D major, or C#, E and A a first inversion of A major)

Here are examples of these chords:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are really nice chords to play and can often be used as substitutes for your standard A and D chords. AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ uses the D/F# chord.

A Second Inversion is where the Perfect 5th is played as the root note.

So for example (B, E, G#) for E major or (G, C and E) for C major.

Here are some examples of these chords:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So have a play around with your triads and see what you come up with! It’s always worth seeking out new ideas and ways of playing to add to your guitar skills.

Many thanks for reading.

You can find other great free tips via my Twitter account @jsmusicschool.

James