ABILITY RATING
Moderate
Info
Key C
Tempo 135bpm
Will improve your…
✓ Scale knowledge
✓ Compositional potention
✓ New fretboard shapes and phrasing
As guitarists we’re always looking for new sounds and inspiration, and love to explore new techniques. But if you still find yourself trapped in the confines of Pentatonic and Major scales, a good way to break this harmonic stalemate is to explore new sounding scales. Although most popular music, rock included to some extent, has a fairly familiar ‘westernised’ sound, music from other countries often carries distinct characteristics that reflect culture, tradition, and history. Just compare music from Japan to the sound of popular western music and you’ll hear many different aspects, from instrumentation to scales and harmony. Japanese music emphasises different intervals, too, and understanding the formulas of these more unusual sounding scales is a rewarding area for us musicians. Well-known players that have exploited the harmonic wonders of these scales include John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola, Marty Friedman, Jason Becker, Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Ritchie Blackmore.
In this feature we will focus on six scales, three Minor and three Major, all of which have their own intervallic DNA, with unique sounds and unusual chordal possibilities.
Although such scales
