Interesting lesson tonight. We went over the track I found from Guitar School Garden, and discussed various ways you could highlight certain notes by making them pop from a regular play of a minor pentatonic. It’s something I started to do on my own, though in no technical details like that, simply listening to chord changes and finding a cool note that sounds good over it. Now I think I’ll try to focus more on finding those special notes that are highlighted by tension chords like m7b5 or m7b9.
And speaking of m7b5, we started looking at the Pentatonic Blues scale. In some ways, I’d started looking at this ages ago but never really worked out where to play that “blue note” but now that I have a better understanding of chord progressions, I can see how they can be placed in strategic positions instead of just being played randomly like I’ve been doing so far. I think part of what I’ve been doing a lot which never worked well was to always play 4 b5 5 in succession without giving much thought to how it can be combined within the scale to create much better sounding licks. Hopefully within the coming weeks, I’ll have figured out ways to really improve on that.
As a side note, my wife sounded surprised that I would enjoy playing blues so much. Clearly that means that all the music I’ve been playing at home so far did not sound like blues by a long shot so there’s room for improvement but obviously it’s not a style I’ve been listening to much and that too ought to be repaired. I’m slowly working on it, swifting through which styles I like and which I do not.