DAY 5 - Scale Substitutions

SFS Fretboard Secrets

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“…When I first watched a few of your videos, I instantly knew there was something different about this system. I cannot believe all guitar players are not taught this way. It’s so simple and it makes sense so quickly.”    J.P.

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📖 Video Transcript:

    Hello and welcome to part 4 of SFS Fretboard Secrets. This is the last video in this series, and I want to thank those of you that have been watching and sharing, and giving me feedback over the last couple of weeks. The response to this mini-course has been great, and I especially want to thank those of you that decided to buy my premium SFS courses or got access to all of them through the String Partner Subscription.


    Your support means a lot to me, and you are helping me make more lessons, and find more, and better ways to teach guitar effectively. I really appreciate it, and I want you to feel that you’re a part of the team, because you are. I could not do what I do without your support.


    Now, if you are new here, and stumbled on this lesson on social media or something, then it’s a good idea to navigate to the previous 3 lessons and catch up, because we covered some very interesting concepts that we are going to combine today, in ways that can make your soloing interesting and creative.


    But before we get into today’s lesson I want to let you know that if you want to try my all premium courses for free, I set up a coupon that gives you a full month of free access to the String Partner Subscription. So you can TRY all the courses for a month, and then, if you don’t want to be charged, you can cancel with a couple of clicks.


[UPDATE: I now have a permanent 7-day trial, no credit card needed, automatic unsubscribe after 7 days]

 

    And for those of you who are familiar with my lessons and were just waiting for the right offer to jump in, I have a way for you to get 3 months free. But I’ll talk about the offers at the end of this video. Right now I’m sure you want to dive into some playing!


    Today I will show you how SFS makes it extremely easy to use scale substitutions in your improvisation. A scale substitution is when, instead of using the “proper” scale in a certain part of a song, you use something else in order to create a certain alternative sound. Sometimes this substitution can be totally unrelated and include some really “wrong” notes.


    But if the style you are playing allows it, you can just use this as tension, and then return back to the right scale tones to resolve that tension. It’s called playing “OUT” meaning outside the harmony, and then returning “IN" [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO] But this is an extreme case of substitution, and not always practical. Today I will show you two types of substitutions that are more “IN” and almost always usable.


Pentatonic Substitutions


    The pentatonic scale, and the blues scale, which is basically the same, apart from the blue note, can be used for many kinds of substitutions. The most important and usual one is the parallel substitution. What this means is that you use the pentatonic with the same root note and the same character in place of the 7-note mode or scale that is the more classically appropriate choice. So for example, when you play over a Dorian, Phrygian, or Aeolian backing track, you can also use the Minor Pentatonic or blues scale with the same root.


    For any Ionian, Mixolydian, and Lydian backing track, you can use the Major Pentatonic or Blues Scale. Today I will demonstrate doing this in Dorian. And for fun, I will switch keys today, to D Dorian. So in the example, I will improvise a couple of phrases in D Dorian, over the D Dorian Backing Track, and then I will switch to D minor blues scale so that you can hear the difference. It produces a more rough, bluesy sound. Now if you know what we did in lessons 1 & 2, then this should be easy for you to try as well. The only thing you need to know is the location of one D Root note. But then I will do something more fun. I will come back to Dorian, and then I will jump to another D, higher up on the fretboard, and switch the scale as well. Watch the Demo, and then you can find instructions, and a D Dorian MP3 backing track in your package to try this yourself [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO].


    Now let’s try a D Harmonic Minor substitution over Dorian. Again, this is a parallel substitution, because it’s based on the same root note, D, and it contains two "wrong notes”. But I prefer to call them high tension notes because if I do this right, and don’t mess it up, they will not sound wrong, just spicy.


    One trick is not to sit too long on these notes and resolve to more stable scale tones after you play them. I won’t go into much detail, because, with just a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to do this by intuition. I’ll just tell you that these notes are the 6th and 7th degree [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO]. These two are different from the ones in Dorian, so you need to go through them and land on the next note up, or the next note down [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO]. Here is an example of this substitution, again over the included backing track [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO].


    Ok, so hopefully you can see the potential of this substitution concept. There’s a lot more to it, but for now, you can use these two substitutions over most kinds of minor songs. Aeolian, Dorian, Minor Blues. Just make sure you practice them for a while and allow your ear to guide you.


    In the beginning, this can sound bad. You may land on the wrong note at the wrong time, especially for the Harmonic minor, but don’t worry about it. Just enjoy exploring, and your ears will do the job. It took me a while to understand this. I used to try to find mathematical solutions for everything, but some things just come if you do the right kind of practice for a while. So experiment over backing tracks, the way I showed you, and you will get used to using these substitutions in no time.


Enjoy your practice, and be effective!

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