Altered Pentatonics
"It's not about imparting knowledge. It's, how can I draw students into what they want?"
It's a challenge to play over changes without sounding mechanical and forced, so I asked rocker Jon Finn for pointers. "The secret is to build on what you already know," he responded. "Take a C9-E♭9-G13-D7#9 progression (Ex. 1). If you were to use nothing but blues licks from a G minor pentatonic scale (Ex. 2), it would work. Some of the notes might sound a little funny, but if your phrasing is strong, your ear accepts it anyway. It's the 'Stevie Ray plays blues licks over any changes' mentality. It works because of his powerful sense of phrasing. Your ear accepts imperfections in tonality because the melody is so strong. It's about delivery -- that magic tone, vibrato and feel.
"When you take a more technical approach, your brain can get so busy trying to negotiate chord changes that your fingers forget vibrato and tone -- all that good stuff -- and you don't want that. Since G minor pentatonic is familiar fretboard territory, why not just change one note per chord? For example, against C9, replace F with E -- the chord's 3 (Ex. 3). It's really a permutation of C Mixolydian, but because your fingers accept it as roughly equivalent to G minor pentatonic, you're in."
"Over E♭9, play G minor pentatonic, but replace D♮ with D♭ (Ex. 4). Technically, you've set up an E♭ Mixolydian sound. For G13, replace the B♭ with B♮ for a G Mixolydian sound (Ex. 5).
"Now D7#9 is an interesting case. By itself, G minor pentatonic will work, but if you swap the F♮ for an F# (Ex. 6), you'll get the chord's 3. Yet the whole charm of a dom7#9 is the major seventh between F# and F♮. So another strategy is to create a two-octave scale that contains both notes (Ex. 6b), so you get the 3 and the #9.
"This approach is cool because the fingerings are simple enough that you can start moving outside them to discover all the stuff in between. It doesn't make your old licks moot. It connects everything."
