Part 8
At 2mins 22 secs in the video Chet invites his student to continue playing the four groups of nine notes (which is shown in the lower half of the video screen) and he then moves up a notch and starts to play something more elaborate (shown in the upper half of the video pane).
So what is Chet doing?
First, he has gone from playing quarter notes (4 per bar played on the count of 1, 2, 3, 4) to eighth notes (8 per bar played on the 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &).
Second, he has maintained the exact same notes being played on the beats, but introduced something new played in between these, on the ‘&’ each time.
So instead of four groups of nine notes he now has four groups of seventeen notes.
Let’s look at that.
Here is the original section of the ‘scale tune’ as previously shown - with extra spacing between notes and between rows that will allow me to add in the extra notes that Chet is playing and to see what he is doing.
In the next diagram I will add in Chet’s extra notes on a row under each existing sequence, spaced in between the original notes. The new notes will be shown in blue.
So to play what Chet is playing you need to play these notes from left to right, reading from two rows, playing black then blue, black then blue with black notes on the 1, 2, 3, 4 and blue notes on the &s between.
This new sequence of extra notes is a parallel set to the original, a sequence of notes from the C Major scale in descending order. Also note that every move from a black note to the next blue note is a drop of a third. Remember those stacked thirds from the chord construction? Chet is basically playing the C Major scale, starting on the note G, in descending thirds. And because of the chord tone phenomenon it still sounds sweetly musical.
Does that make sense?
If not, maybe this will help.
Here is the C Major scale again:
Now here is the C Major scale in descending order starting at the highest available note G (as Chet does when playing)
and finishing at the note lowest available note E on the 6th string of the guitar:
Now here is that same descending C Major scale with the addition of the notes Chet plays, shown in pairs of descending thirds. These pairs are made up of a black note and a blue note side by side, left to right.
Note that I have simply rolled all of the notes, which overlap and double back on themselves in the four groups, into one long stream. This is only for the purpose of illustrating the descending pattern of thirds. Which I hope you can clearly see by referring to the C Major scale shown above them.
Here is a series of similar diagrams but this time split in to the four groups of seventeen notes.
If you play these notes, top-to-bottom, left-to-right, black-to-blue, then you will be playing Chet’s second section of the ‘scale tune’.
Does that make sense?
Next up will be the third and fourth sections, between 3mins 06 secs and 4mins 32 secs.
But that’ll be easy - he’s just playing ascending rather than descending sequences.
No problems there.
Then I’ll move on to the G Major scale possibilities.
