Hey Friend,
Happy Friday!
This one is particularly sweet for me, because I’m not going to the j.o.b.! Takin’ a vaca day to do a little trip to historic St. Augustine, Florida with the fam…
There were a couple articles this week from Guitar World that I wanted to bring to your attention.
We’ve talked about chromatic scales and patterns, and I gave you some exercises, but those didn’t really dig into the level of expressiveness you can have by mixing in these notes that “don’t fit” within the scale or key.
Guthrie Govan did a lesson on chromatic passing tones that I thought explained this very well. If you don’t know Guthrie (and I admit, I’ve heard of him but didn’t know anything until reading some this morning), he’s another virtuoso similar to Joe Satriani or Steve Vai.
I knew he was known as a shredder, so I didn’t know what to expect from the lesson. However, I found it very easy to understand and Govan seems to be a very approachable guy.
So we’re all on the same page, a passing tone is a note you slip into a riff on your way to the note you actually want to play.
The formal definition is "a non-chord tone (dissonance) that occurs between two chord tones, creating step-wise motion."
By chord tone, they mean notes that occur within a chord (and the scale).
He gives examples throughout the video (and the article basically transcripts the video) with tabs.
It’s definitely a more advanced concept, but I thought his explanation gives you the framework of understanding, which is the foundation for anything we want to learn.
You’ve got to understand what he’s talking about before you can learn it, right?
Chromatic passing tones sound really cool, so watch the video and expand your knowledge. The other article is from Jimmy Brown. We’ve seen him before when I talked about the minor drop chord progression.
This is a fun one - you get to learn the intro riff to AC/DCs “ Thunderstruck.”
You gotta love AC/DC. Their music is bare bones, raw and easy to understand.
The hardest part about this riff is just getting up to speed and playing it clean. Follow Jimmy’s example and start off slow.
I’ll put together the tabs of it for Sunday, but in the meantime, it’s pretty easy to follow along.
I’ll catch you later - have a great one!
Peace~
Dave
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