Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Just Like Starting Over

In my ongoing effort to improve my guitar playing, I'm trying to learn some new scale patterns. For some time I've felt that I'm in a minor pentatonic rut because the pattern is simple and transposable.

That shape, also called the "blues box" has carried me this far by simply moving the root note to the appropriate key. So this month I'll be drilling major and modal shapes into my repertoire.


Repeating these patterns and committing them to memory is long over due; something I've put off because repetition is boring and learning something new is difficult. But a guitarist who only plays one scale is like a painter who only uses one color. The time has come to expand my palette, the blue period ends. Beautiful work came out of that period, but artists change, and art is change.

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