GUITARHABITS

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3rds Intervals over 5 Major Scale Shapes/Positions

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I hope you are doing okay with everything that is going on now. These are crazy times, but we have to make the best of it. We have to help each other out while keeping a safe distance, be considerate of others, smile to people to relieve a bit of their burden, but with all that don’t forget yourself along the way. Being kind to yourself too. Have a bit of fun. Try to enjoy the present moment.

For those of you who stay at home, you might have some more time on your hands now to enjoy the guitar, develop a nice practice routine, and make some good progress. Well, here’s a great guitar workout for you…

Practicing melodic intervals really developed my skills to solo and improvise over major chord progressions. Just by going through the scale intervals on a regular basis you are training the muscle memory for your fingers and acquiring the vocabulary for your creative mind to help you shape your musical brain and come up with melodic ideas. It’s an exercise that is not to be underestimated.

In this lesson we are going to learn “melodic intervals in 3rds” following the major scale. We’ll practice these 3rd intervals over 5 different scale shapes/positions across the neck, so we’ve got a great workout for you! Don’t worry we’ll take it step by step.

Make sure you know the major scale in 5 shapes/positions before you start this lesson, but on the other hand you can also skip that for now if you just became excited to dive into this lesson. You can always come back to that later. I can imagine you want to try at least the first exercise to know what we’re talking about here. I totally understand.

Another upside is that the exercises will train your ear to recognize 3rd intervals. This will improve your aural skills, which is a important part of becoming an accomplished musician (Try to sing along the notes as you play the exercises). The practice of playing the intervals will also increase your dexterity. A win-win situation in many ways.

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Double Stops and Blues Licks Around The Entire Neck

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A double stop is when you play two notes at the same time, also called “dyads” (you might have heard of the more familiar term “triads” where you play three notes at the same time).

While solos usually consists of single note lines, you can give your phrasing some extra colour and more chunk by playing some double stops here and there.

Double stops is just guitar slang for “harmonic intervals”. An interval is the distance between any two notes and harmonic means simultaneously sounding tones. Harmonic intervals can be played in thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths and sevenths.

You can hear them a lot in rock and blues and guitar players love using them to enhance their soloing.

Here are two examples of classic blues double stop guitar intros:

Cold shot – Stevie Ray Vaughan

Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry

You can apply harmonic intervals to every scale, but today we’re focusing on playing fourths in the A minor pentatonic scale. The application of fourths is one of the most used double stops in blues and rock.

In the tabs below you can see that almost every two notes are on the same fret, so you need to bar two strings with either your first finger (index finger), third finger (ring finger) or fourth finger (pinky). Continue Reading

Diatonic 3rd Intervals – Melodic and Harmonic, Incl. TABS

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Photo by Duncan McKinnon

Intervals are used in all styles of guitar music from pop, blues, country to jazz and classical music.

Learning to play and understand intervals are a great value to your guitar playing. It will help you to understand chords, scales and add beautiful melodic and harmonic ideas to your improvisation.

Today I’ll start with the interval of a third. It’s probably the most often used interval in pop music, but also widely used in all other styles.

In music theory, an interval is the distance in pitch between any two notes. When you play these two notes simultaneously they are called harmonic intervals. When you play the notes separately one after the other they are called melodic intervals.

Here are two ways to determine intervals:

1 – Finding intervals by counting the number of semitones between the two notes.
2 – Finding intervals within a scale. (diatonic intervals)
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