Running Laps Around Your Fretboard

BRIDGING THE GAP

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Let's face it, playing a professional, well polished solo is extremely difficult. More often than not, we find ourselves confined to a certain area of the fretboard. Perhaps you are playing a solo based on a certain scale that you like, such as a pentatonic or mixolydian. Whatever the case, you end up getting the same sounds over and over.

We have all faced that frustrating situation at one time or another. There's nothing worse than being stuck with the same tones and not knowing what to do with the hundreds of options available to you. The good news is that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

The guitar is not designed to be frustrating. In fact, the fretboard is configured to make your life as easy as possible. How does it make your life easier? By connecting scale patterns. As you may remember from previous lessons, each scale has five individual patterns. These patterns cover the entire neck of the guitar.

What you may not know is that each of those five patterns overlap each other at some point on the fretboard. This is the key to stepping out of that one scale pattern and sprinting across the fretboard. You can now take advantage of every note within that particular key.

While it is impossible for us to cover every scale in detail, as there are over 80 patterns to remember, we can investigate the most useful.

Pentatonic scale pattern.

By now, the majority of you have heard of the pentatonic scale. It is theoretically one of the easiest scales we have available to us and is the most practical for soloing. The beauty of this scale is that you can use it to play any key and still sound great.

The scale pattern that made the minor pentatonic scale famous is the following:
 

... While that scale pattern may be the most famous, there are four other extremely useful patterns that you should know. They are as follows:

#1

#2

#3

or

#4

or

#5

or

..Get extremely comfortable with all five of the above scales. With practice, you can easily master them within a short period of time. Take care not to confuse them and mix them up, because they will be the foundation that the rest of your solos will be based on.

To answer the question of how they fit together, we must first look at what key we are playing in. Once you decide which key you are playing in. Let's use the key of Am as our first example, which is the same as C(more on that in a minute). Take your #1 scale pattern, and place the first note on the 8th fret of your low E string, which is a C.

Keep in mind that these scale patterns can also be played in the key of C. This is due to the 6th note of any scale being the relative minor. Since we are using the pentatonic minor scale pattern, the minor key makes more sense. Both have the same key signatures, just different patterns.