E flat pentatonic

You may be familiar with the pentatonic scale - a lot of guitarists learn this early on. Here's a typical fingering of the minor pentatonic pattern in E flat:

Why E flat though? Well this scale in this 'key' uses all the accidentals—the sharps or flats—and no natural notes. Here it is with all the notes:

Its a handy thing to keep in mind when learning the notes on the fretboard.

Learning all the notes on the fretboard

OK, it's been a while since I posted anything on this. To summarise what I covered previously:

1. Learn where D is everywhere on the fretboard
2. Use that to see where B, C, E and F are (hint: they have symmetry around D)
3. Learn G#/Ab, as this is the flipside to D—the same sort of axis of symmetry applies to G#, and this also establishes the tritone relationship

So where to from here? I would suggest the following:

1. Use your knowledge of the location of G#/Ab to learn G and A seeing as they are only a semitone below and above. You should now know all the natural note locations.
   
2. You can learn the sharps/flats by their relationships to the natural notes, and I recommend the following:
   
   • that you learn the notes immediately either side of D, so that covers C#/Db and D#/Eb
   • then you should learn the sharp/flat notes either side of G#/Ab, which are a tone above and below at A#/Bb and F#/Gb respectively

Remember that becoming aware of the symmetry is that exists alongside the note names can really help to remember the note relationships and locations.

There are a couple of other helpful things to investigate including becoming familiar with the distinctive tritone pattern occurs on the 4th and 7th degrees of any major scale—so in C major that's F and B. There is also an interesting relationship with the Pentatonic scale which I'll cover next time.

2 string modes: Locrian

Lucky last locrian:

2 string modes: Aeolian

Same deal as last time—the fourth degree is marked in blue as you would usually choose to play one or the other.



Note the nice symmetry in the Aeolian mode when it is shown this way.

2 string modes: Mixolydian

The Mixolydian mode as a pattern that repeats every 2 strings:




And here both of the above patterns are combined. The blue coloured notes are the 4th degrees of the scale, so typically you would play only one of each in a scale or arpeggio because they are the same notes (they're enharmonic):

As I stated a while ago, this is actually a feature of these 2 string modes—the 4th degree is immediately before/after the string crossing so you have the option to play it wherever it suits you.

2 string modes: Lydian

The next mode is Lydian. With all 7 notes on 2 adjacent strings the pattern repeats identically in each octave:




Personally I prefer the 2nd pattern which places the semitone steps at the string crossings. Note that with the scale of F Lydian all the notes are natural (i.e. from C major).

2 string modes: Phrygian

Two patterns for the Phrygian mode:





Note that the pattern repeats over pairs of adjacent strings.

2 string modes: Dorian

A while ago I posted a major scale pattern that covered an octave on 2 strings. A big advantage of this is that the pattern can be repeated across the fretboard without alteration to cover 3 octaves in total.

This can be applied to other scales or modes of course, so here's the first which is for the Dorian mode:





You can see that it's possible to finger this 2 ways depending on which of the two strings you choose to play the 4th degree of the mode. There are a number of places to make the position shifts, and you may choose to alter these depending on if the notes are ascending or descending.

The other cool thing about learning these 2 string groupings is that it's really easy to just locate the root of the mode wherever you like on the neck and play with the 2 string pattern from there— the only one that's different is when the root is on the G string (just shift the 2nd string notes up a semitone).