The one minute major third expansion


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Using every available note on the fretboard

I hope you had fun with the idea and the licks in my last article. Today I’m going to expand a bit on that same simple idea. But before I go on I would like to make this clear: You can use all available notes on the entire fretboard to play over any Blues Rock chord progression, and when you come to the end of these articles, you will! So the point of these article is not to show you what notes you can use and what notes you can’t. It is to provide you with ideas that has different flavors to them.

Scales are nothing but "sounds"

The basic minor pentatonic has a specific sound to it. Add the blue note and you get another sound. Add the notes we talked about in my last article and you get yet another sound. But you still know where home is. You still know that the notes of the basic pentatonic scale are the “safe” ones to rest on in a solo. Consider that your base and then move in and out of these tonal ideas that I’m giving you. If you draw up all the notes that I’ll giving you on a piece of paper, you’re going to end up having a dot on every string and every fret of the fretboard. The point is to jump from idea to idea, one at a time, and to create interesting shifts in the sound of what you play.

An idea you can learn and use in one minute

So here’s the next idea that you can absorb and use in just one minute. Take the shapes from the previous article but now every time that you see this shape in your original blues scale shapes:

- Add a note at the end of it instead like this:



In the previous article you added a note before the last note:

- now you place it after the last note instead:




The five blues scale shapes with the  added notes

Pretty simple right?
This will make you go from a minor third to a major third and this can give you some interesting sounds to play around with. This is how your five blues scale shapes will look like when you’ve added these two notes on to them:

Shape 01



Shape 02



Shape 03



Shape 04



Shape 05

Please try them out and listen for that strange but somewhat familiar sound. Now here a five licks that is based on this particular idea. One for each of the five E-Blues shapes. Play around with them and enjoy the added freedom you have.


One Minute Major Third Expansion Licks




Look for the "idea" in each lick and then try to use that idea in all five shapes across the neck