Sometimes you need to switch scales while you are soloing, either because the key of the song changes, or just because you want to outline each chord of the song and hit those sweet chord tones. That’s considered a difficult challenge, especially on the guitar. But thankfully, the String Fragment System™ comes to the rescue!
Hey friends,
This is Prokopis from String Systems, and today I’ll show you how to improvise melodies that flow from one scale to another smoothly, without needing to interrupt your phrasing and jump somewhere else on the fretboard for each scale. If you like this lesson, you can get the complete mini-course for free.
Let’s take a chord progression that would usually be considered tough to improvise over. Let’s say our song goes from Am7 to Cm7, to Ebm7, to F#m7 [example in the video].
These chords belong to different keys, so you can’t play a single scale and just go through the whole thing. What we are going to do is to use the corresponding pentatonic scale for each chord. But if you learned pentatonic scales the old-school way, using box shapes, this becomes very tricky. If you use the very familiar box one, that would force you to interrupt your phrases as you jump from one position to another [example in the video].
This can sound ok, but it’s usually very limiting because you need to interrupt and jump all the time. Another approach would be to do some mental gymnastics and mix different box shapes that happen to be in the same area so that you can weave your melodic lines through them.
Well, that’s one challenge where using SFS instead of boxes can make things much easier. First, let’s just find the root notes for each chord. We’ll use A on string 6, C on string 3, Eb on string 5, and F# on string 4. Those of you that have been learning the String Fragment with me for a while can probably build complete positions for each starting on these root notes. But to make things easier, I will just use 3 string fragments for each scale: SF1, SF2, and SF3 [example in the video].
As we learned in the previous lesson, you need to shift one fret up when you cross into the top 2 strings, which is the case with the C and the F# [example in the video].
So now we have this easy 3-string system that we can play over each chord. And they are all located close enough that it’s possible to make your phrases move smoothly through them. It still takes some practice, but it’s definitely doable, and a lot of fun [example in the video].
On this lesson page, you can find a practice track where you can play along with me while seeing the string fragments on the screen to help you learn this. Something you could do as a warm-up, before actually improvising, is to play the scale up and down as an exercise [example in the video].
Do this a few times until you feel comfortable, and then you can start soloing.
That’s it for today.
In the next lesson, we’ll talk about how we can develop a complete arsenal of soloing ideas at the same time as we are learning to build scales on the fretboard. This way we can increase our creativity together with our knowledge!
Until then, enjoy your practice and be effective.
