(Jazz guitar music)
- Hi everybody, my name is Jens Larsen.
In this video, I'm going to take the Hirajoshi scale,
which is a Japanese pentatonic scale,
and I'm gonna show you how that works extremely well
for making some licks with a Dorian or a Lydian type sound.
I'm also gonna show you how, if you take any scale,
but in this case just the pentatonic scale,
how I go about looking for melodic ideas
and finding arpeggios and patterns within the scale
that you can use when you are making lines
and when you're getting used to it.
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about improvising over chord changes,
interesting scales and arpeggios,
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The hirajoshi scale is a pentatonic scale.
And of course, Hirajoshi is--
I hope I'm not completely slaughtering the name,
is a Japanese word, so it's a Japanese pentatonic scale.
If you check this out on Wikipedia and a few other places,
you'll see they don't really agree on where the root is.
The way I'm going to think about the scale in this video,
because I don't really care too much
about what the root of the scale is
because I'm putting it on top of other chords,
is that if it's in the key of E,
or we think of E as the root here,
then we have this scale.
So E...
F#...
G...
B...
C...
And E.
So...
You can look at this as being sort of a pentatonic scale,
if you build a pentatonic scale from the sixth degree
of a major scale, then this is actually what you get.
Because you would use one,
Two, three, five, and six.
Similar if you play one from C major,
it would be one,
two...
Three, five, six.
So that's kinda one way of looking at it.
It's easy to relate to it if we think about it like that
because it's close to how we normally work
with pentatonic scales.
There are going to be a few things
that I'm going to work with.
This is going to be a little bit guitar-oriented
in terms of some of the patterns that I'm using,
and some of the approaches to finding material.
But for the rest, this whole video will actually work
just as well for any other instrument.
It's not really about that,
but I'm going to use a few guitar tricks, so to speak.
The way we play pentatonic scales most of the time
on guitar is two notes per string.
So of course you know...
(musical scale)
This A minor pentatonic scale.
If we take this scale and make it
into a two note per string structure,
then that could be something like that.
(pentatonic scale)
And of course you can do this in five positions
because it's a pentatonic scale.
The reason why I'm doing this,
this might seem less than obvious in the beginning,
but there are just a lot of things
that are really nice to do
with two note per string patterns.
And we already know them because we already checked
out most of the pentatonic scales.
So we might as well try and use them
on other structures that are similar to the normal
minor pentatonic scale that we all know and love so much.
Another way of playing this pentatonic scale
that's really useful is to think of it
as being sort of a small cell
that you can move around in octaves.
And probably anybody who's checked out any kind
of heavy-metal tutorials online will recognize this shape.
(plays Hirajoshi scale)
To start exploring the scale and figuring out
what kind of chords we can use it on,
let's just look at the notes
and see if we can come up with something.
So if we have E...
F#...
G...
B...
C...
And of course it repeats,
so E, F#, G, B, C, E.
Then we have two octaves of the scale.
And a few things that sort of jumps out at me,
is if we take the notes...
C...E...and G...
Then we have a C-major triad.
So that's in there.
And we can also take E, G, and B.
Okay, that's here.
Okay, so E, G, and B, that's an E-minor triad.
Another structure that's in there is...
B...E...and F#.
So that's a Bsus4...
And also one that's a little bit less common
would be F#...B, and C.
Which is like an F, dim, sus sharp four triad.
So if we look at those triads,
we can also see that we have actually a complete...
C-Major seven arpeggio in here.
And actually the scale is Cmaj7,
with an added #11.
So that's kinda given us the Lydian vibe.
And this also was telling us we can use this very well
to get sort of a Dorian sound.
Sort of like a Cmaj7(#11).
Like this one.
Over on A, so it would be...
This type of sound.
(Am13 Dorian chord)
Which is probably where I would suggest using this.
The reason I don't use it on E
is we don't actually have a seventh degree.
So we only have the C but we're kind of missing something
that would be a D, or a D#
to get something that we can really use on an E minor.
In my opinion, anyway.
The next thing we can do, is to take some structure
and then try to move that through the scale
just to get a better overview of what's in there.
And see if we can find some arpeggios
or chords that we can use.
And I'm just gonna start with really just looking
at what notes are in there and making sort of
an observation, what is possible to make.
And the voicing that I have here
is a Gmaj7 shell voicing.
Which is contained in the scale
because we have G, B, and F# in the scale.
And if I move that through the scale,
so the idea here is...
This scale is kind of easy to think of on one string
because we have sort of one cluster of notes
which is E, F#, and G.
And then we have B and C.
And then that repeats.
So those patterns really help us
when we need to move something along the neck.
It's like a chord shape, like this, through the scale.
And that's really what I'm going
to be doing in this next example.
So we start with the Gmaj7 shell voicing.
And I'm not going to do it in detail for all the voicings,
but just to show you the idea,
so G...the next note up from G would be a B.
From this B here, the next note is C.
From the F#, the next note is a G.
And then we have this one.
If I do that again, then B moves up to C.
C moves up to E.
And G moves up to B.
And you have a C major shell voicing.
And we can just repeat that, and we get this voicing.
And this voicing.
So all in all...
It's a really interesting sounding voicing.
And they will all work really well
for some sort of A minor Dorian or C Lydian sound.
And of course we can also use them as arpeggios, so...
(jazz guitar arpeggios)
If we start building chords the same way
as we can with a normal pentatonic scale,
then really what we do is just sort of split
the pentatonic scale into a first and second row of notes.
And just put three of those together.
And if we do that with this fingering,
so we have of course...
(pentatonic guitar picking)
this fingering for this scale.
Then we get these voicings.
(strums jazz chord)
And here we have this one, which is sort of like a D7(13)
without a D, or an Am6,
or some sort of C, Cmaj7(#11) without a third.
So that's useful for the kind of sound that we're going for.
The next one, this one,
is the same as this...
If we play it an octave higher.
That's a C major triad and the first inversion.
Then we get this from F#,
which is in fact our B.
So B...sus4 triad.
Then we have...
This, which is like a C Lydian triad inversion.
And then we get the final one,
which is an E minor triad.
So if we take these triads and move them along the neck
in the middle strings, that would be this.
(plays chord voicings)
As I mentioned, there are some things
that are really easy to play if we think
in terms of the two notes per string patterns.
And then some stuff will just sort of fall naturally
within the scale and give us
some great material to work with.
And an example of that could be this pattern,
that's a five note grouping start on this G.
So...
(plays pentatonic pattern)
A similar idea could be a pattern like this.
(plays scale pattern)
And of course, this scale is laid out
quite differently on the fret board,
with the two notes per string type pattern.
And it's more difficult to play than a normal
minor pentatonic scale.
But still, I think this works really well,
and it's a nice way to just come up with some ideas.
And you can use some of the same patterns
that you would normally use in a pentatonic scale.
So in that way it's easy to just use some material,
and get some easy, accessible, melodic ideas from that way.
(plays Dorian Jazz Lick)
The first example starts off with this arpeggio,
which is of course...
The D7(13) chord voicing without the root.
And this an arpeggio I use a lot.
I find it extremely useful, both for the Dorian
and the Lydian sounds.
And actually also just to mixolydian or even,
diminished type of dominant sound.
And here I'm starting with leading notes,
so I'm sliding into the C.
And then I'm using the pattern that I talked about
in the previous example, so that's...
This pattern.
And then from the next string set as well.
And then down to an E.
Skipping down to C.
And ending on the F#, which in this case
is like the 13 on the A-minor.
And of course, I think all these lines,
you can use them on the A minor and also
on the C Lydian sound.
So really, whether it's Dorian or Lydian,
doesn't really matter too much.
And this line would work just as well
if you played it over...
C seventh flat five or #11.
The second example, I'm also playing an A minor chord,
so over this A minor 13.
But again, you can use it on the C as well.
I'm starting with basically the scale minus one note.
So it's the scale minus the C,
and that gives me this E minor at nine arpeggio.
So...
(plays arpeggio)
And I'm playing two octaves left,
down to the E again.
Then we get a C shell voicing.
And then an F#.
And then just down the scale,
to end on the ninth of the A minor.
(jazzy guitar)
The third example has a background
of a Cmaj7(#11),
of a b5 chord just to really demonstrate
the Lydian idea works quite well.
And the first part of it is an E minor triad,
so this is E minor first inversion triad,
with a leading note.
So...
And then the next part is a Bsus4 triad.
So E minor first.
Bsus4.
Then a Cmaj7 arpeggio.
And then I'm repeating the first phrase again.
So there's an E minor first inversion triad
with a leading note.
But I'm playing it from this F#, so...
(jazz guitar lick)
This example is also really emphasizing the Lydian sound
you can use this scale for.
I'm starting with a pattern that's coming
out of this fingering, so...
But I'm playing it descending
so I'm starting on the G, so...
And then just using this octave.
From this B, I'm just using an E minor triad,
and then up to F#.
And here I'm using the F# to just lead
into a Gmaj7 shell voicing.
Followed by a Cmaj7 shell voicing.
And then down the E minor triad,
and then ending on the #11.
(Strums Lydian Chord)
As you can tell, I'm not really that concerned
with which note is the root note in the scale,
and what kind of tonality it implies.
Because the way I use pentatonic scales when I'm playing,
well at least when I'm improvising like this,
is really just a set of notes that have a certain sound.
So they are certain extensions on top of another chord,
and they have certain intervals,
and contain in that way a sound that I can put
on top of another chord.
So I'm really not concerned with
what the root of the scale is,
because I'm anyway mostly using this on two chords,
one of which, the root is not really
even contained in the scale.
And I think that's the most normal way
to really work with pentatonic scales in jazz in general.
If you have an idea for a pentatonic scale
that I should try and go over and work through
like I'm working through this one,
then leave a comment.
And of course, also, if you have an idea
for some sort of arpeggio or structure
that I forgot to talk about,
then you can also leave a comment on that
because the more complete we have in terms of--
the more material we have on the scale, the better.
And it can sometimes be difficult
to just spot all the chords that are in there, of course.
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That's about it for this week.
Thank you for watching,
and until next week.
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