17th Jan

17th Jan – Today in our music lesson we jammed purple rain again for first hour. We recapped on what we had done the week before and we done this by running through the purple rain chords and each taking a turn at soloing over the chords using the first 5 notes of the A major scale.  Each of us had practised at home so when we came back into lesson this week we had a strong idea of what we wanted to play over the chords today. My weeks worth of practise had helped as I had came up with different patterns to play over the chord. An example of this was repeating this pattern on the g string : 2nd fret, 4th and then 5th, Repeating this pattern using hammer ons and pull offs allowed me to create a smooth legato sounding phrase that was melodically pleasing.

We then practised the A major and minor pentatonic scales over the chords which allowed us to add more notes that we could use to improvise with. This was good as it gave us more of a variety of melodies we could come up with. I used many common blues licks over this chord progression as the notes kitten well. An example of this was being the 7th fret on the g string up a tone then hitting the double stop of the 5th fret b and e strings then repeating this pattern over and over to achieve a fast
sounding pattern over the chords.
-e--------------7
b---------------7
g----5(b) -----------

Being a guitarist I already know the major and minor and pentatonic scale so I focus on playing this scales together over the chords and also playing the A major scale but with notes from the minor pentatonic Scale added such as adding in minor thirds and minor sevenths.  The other musicians then went away and individual practice on these scales was done for rest of 2nd hour of the lesson. Using the same idea as from last weeks lesson i set my self the challenge of creating melodic phrases that fit well over the chords using notes from the a major and a minor pentatonic scale. My plan is to come up with some melodic sounding phrases that utilise both scales and I won't to use a less is more approach to make up very musical and pleasing patterns. I will give myself a week to do this and I will practise this by playing over a loop of the chords.