Key changes. When I was learning guitar, no one really explained how these work to me. There are some basic approaches I figured out, such as modulating between keys with shared chords… or just abruptly changing key. But I always liked knowing why something worked, or having a set of rules I could follow. I didn’t have any such rules for writing key changes.
Then my guitar teacher introduced me to a classical pianist called Chopin.
I read a great quote on music inspiration the other day:
The famous composer Schubert is said to have told a friends that his own creative process consisted in “remembering a melody” that neither he nor anyone else had ever thought of before
and it got me thinking about creativity. A lot of people have the false belief that creativity is something that “the chosen few” are naturally born with. I prefer to think of it as a muscle.
This is a very cool technique and will serve two big purposes:
Give you a new songwriting tool Help fix up what is (probably) a weak area of your playing. What we are looking at with this lesson is creating riffs using arpeggios based on two strings. Let’s quickly recap the intervals in the arpeggios that we are going to be using today:
Major: 1 3 5
Minor: 1 b3 5
This is a neoclassical tool we can use in lead composition. We are going to look at extracts from Bach’s 1st Cello Suite, Prelude and Courante, see how Bach uses pedal points, then look at how we can apply this in our own playing.
Extract from Courante in Bach's 1st Cello Suite This extract is from Bach’s Prelude in his first Cello Suite.
You can see that from the second beat of this example, Bach is using the note D (fret 7 on the G string), and then chromatically ascending from D, and going back to D each time.
Today we are going to look at some ideas we can use within the harmonized major scale to help us compose tapping ideas. We’ll be looking at the e and B strings.
We are going to be basing these ideas around three shapes:
Major: 1 3 5 Minor: 1 b3 5 Diminished: 1 b3 b5 So, to start off with, let’s out the notes in the following chords:
C major: C E G C minor: C Eb G C diminished: C Eb Gb Next, for each of those three chords, we want to map out those notes in ascending order on the second string.