THE Pentatonic Shape that Will Change Your Playing - 10 days guitar challenge

What if I tell you there are only five positions, five fingerings that you really need to know to feel very free with guitar?

All right, so check this out.

If you think about these artists.

Or this one.

All these guys are amazingly fluent on a guitar, but there's one thing that they're doing that is really, really effective, and I'm gonna show you exactly what it is.

Just dive in.

The thing all masters of guitar do is they dive deep into the information.

They really, really know what they're dealing with.

That means that if they're dealing with pentatonic, for example, let's take this F center, F minor, or even F minor pentatonic.

And these artists that we're talking about will dive deep into information and will see it in two main ways.

One, very systematic in an area, and the other one,

basically spread out on the guitar.

Now, the key thing to do it is two things, and I'm going to show you exactly how I practice it.

The first step is understanding the pure fingerings and the motoric of the thing.

So for that, this is kind of section one of this video.

We'll do the following.

Oh, let's make it a 10 day guitar challenge where we actually practice every day this thing and make it really tight.

I'm gonna play a little backing track, and I'm gonna start with one position and talk it through until I cross the whole five position.

I'll show you the fingering, I'll talk about how I'm thinking about it, and if you do it every day, you will be able to do that way, way more easily.

Losing F, here.

Follow me.

Focus.

Change the subdivision.

I'll skip forward a little bit now you want to stay here

What I'm saying is, what I mean to say here is, I mean, you don't want to just kind of be able to play it once.

Now, the tempo doesn't matter.

What matters is the flow.

A lot of times, people are not really strict when they're practicing the elements, and what I'm saying is, try to take each one of these elements, quarter notes, eighth notes, triplets, sixteenths, sextuplets, whatever you want.

It could be slow, it could be fast, but what's important here is to be able to succeed many times, even if it's faster, for example,

And so on and so forth.

The point is to try to bring this element to a place of control and some sort of flow, which oftentimes people say like, oh, I can play, they play it once and they're like, okay, I'm done.

No, no, no.

We really need to push it way, way above.

I took a lesson with this guitar player.

pretty amazing and one of the things the interesting thing that he told me was that you need to bring the classical piece or the element that you're practicing basically 150 percent more than you're actually going to play it in the gig so the gig is 100 of of how the piece should sound okay that's the speed it needs to be but when you're practicing and shedding you need to

have kind of a high ceiling above your head, otherwise it's not gonna feel comfortable at all.

So this idea is, again, I know you know this position, I know you've seen it, I know you can play it, but there's a huge difference between really feeling comfortable, really knowing each one of the notes,

and being able to articulate in a clear way between that and what probably a lot of you are doing now.

And I'm saying it because I was the same.

I did the same thing.

I was like, oh, I know it's pentatonic, five notes, whatever.

No, it's not whatever.

It's amazing five notes.

It's very important.

It's important to understand how to work with this.

okay next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to do this other position but i'm going to i'm going to connect these two positions so first thing just this position and then connecting both check this out i'll kind of speed it up but when you're practicing it please play it slower by the way this video is sponsored by neural dsp i use their plugin all the time i think it sounds awesome it's amazing really easy to use

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So, the other position.

I'm using hammer on pull off.

You don't have to push it too crazy fast Maybe even here Shifting between these two As if it's one Next here

Etc.

So what I'm going to do is literally work on each one of these positions until they're extremely clear so I can do these ideas with much more ease because they're in my fingers and I hear how... Let's have a close look over this position here.

So this is the fingering that I'm using.

But it's very important for me to see this F and this F and have them sort of an anchor point because I'm listening to everything here from the point of view of this F. So that means that this is my A flat, this is my B flat, this is my C, this is the one, flat three, four, five.

And I keep thinking about this relationship between these notes because if I don't think about it, I'm missing a huge

emotional power on this process of music, right?

So it's very important for me to see it and to hear it from that point of view.

Now the same thing, I'm going to play it one more time and then I'm gonna mix these first three positions with a subdivision, then change the subdivision and move in between them.

Three positions.

now you can shift between them at will try to know the notes C, Bb, Ab, F so the idea of understanding and knowing what you're doing is really important and helpful if you have a guitar, join me if you don't, it's a little sad

The point is to get comfortable with a different subdivision and being able to move and shift between these sounds because in real life when you're improvising

You just wanna imagine that sound and have it comfortably available and I think that's one of the biggest challenges and this is one of the places that a lot of people fall because basically what happens is you know the positions, I know you know it,

but you don't really know it well enough.

You don't really hear the subdivision.

You don't really clearly see the notes articulated.

And, you know, if you want to kind of go to the next step, go to the next level, I'm encouraging you in these 10 days, just dive in fully with those five positions.

And it will allow so much more freedom.

We have two more positions we need to do, which is this one here.

And this one here.

At the end of the day, you'll have this collage, or basically, you know, this F minor pentatonic sound is all across the guitar.

This is a really, really, really helpful exercise and way to improvise, and it's sort of between improvisation and an exercise, because we're just working on a subdivision, but then, very shortly, we will take that into solo.

Now there's one more exercise that I find extremely helpful in this process, and it's this one.

Just having the center

just kind of this F sound and I'm going to play notes kind of in time but I'm going to jump between the areas to try and challenge myself to see the notes all across the guitar

And you can make a mistake, it's totally fine, but I want you to try and see the colors of that sound.

sort of like exploration in a musical way but not detached or i would say detached from positions almost this is the exercise of breaking the patterns in a way of positions so i can see and jumps

you can make it even slower or you know more expressive and of course if you want you can do the same idea in time for example I'm just trying to challenge myself to hear it and to see it slowly but surely on the board

I'm trying to kind of break through from the position so it's not just it's not just that it's more

Right, so I'm trying to do these jumps and I'm trying to do these sounds.

Now, you can find whatever way or whatever tempo that works for you.

It could be slow, it could be...

The idea here is breaking the positions of the Edwina pentatonic and seeing the guitar as one kind of unit.

Now, both of these exercises, the really meticulous playing of the positions, but really zooming in into one subdivision until it's clear, and from the other side, taking this liberty of just trying to see the board and trying to choose notes,

they're both very important because they're both highlighting the guitar in a different way and the idea is that we need to find the colors and connect to them, both emotionally, both physically, knowing where they are and also, you know, soundly.

Like, hearing it and saying, ah, this is the sound that I want to hear and I'm choosing one of these five colors every time.

Five notes, penta, five.

But it's such a deep sound

So beautiful, so if we actually wanna take our playing to this other level of proficiency, I think diving into this and making ourselves a little challenge of 10 days is a really, really cool thing.

Thank you so much for watching.

I hope this was helpful and interesting and fun.

I'll see you very soon.

Try not to kill anybody.

Please spread love and peace around you and I'll see you soon.