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168 Part III: Beyond the Basics: Playing Like a Pro TEAM LinG
Many beginning guitarists fall into the trap of not knowing what key they’re in
when they’re playing something. You can learn any motor-skill function by
rote, but for playing guitar, you should always know, at the very least, what
key you’re in.
The following sections help you understand the relationship between keys
and positions.
Recognizing common keys and
their comfortable positions
Each of the 12 keys has one or two positions ideally suited for playing blues
licks. You can venture in and out of these positions for little licks in the extensions,
or you can leave a position completely to grab a high or low note, but
you generally find yourself anchored in just a couple of positions to play
most blues licks in a particular key. And pentatonic positions aren’t the only
ones that yield “tasty” results, as you see in the next section.
This chapter covers a lot of information about patterns for the pentatonic
scale and its close relative the blues scale. But there are other patterns, too,
that fit the blues. One sound the pentatonic patterns don’t cover is the sweet
notes, which are discussed in Chapter 7.
But take a look at a pattern that provides you with a sweet note. As it so happens,
a nice sweet-note pattern exists on the top three strings, just two frets
above the upper extension of the home-position minor pentatonic. And the
fingering happens to be the same, except for the added note. The sweet-note
pattern has a different sound than the pentatonic scale, but it’s very useful in
blues. Figure 9-14 shows a solo that uses notes that are different from the
ones in the pentatonic scale but that use a familiar fingering pattern.
Mapping keys to positions
In mapping keys to position, if you’ve already explored the key of A blues,
then you notice that it sits well in fifth position. So by reasonable deduction,
G blues would fit third position, right?
Your fingers don’t have to do any more work to transpose all the A licks to
G; it’s just your brain that has to make sure that you’ve made the transfer
correctly.
Figure 9-15 is a table that shows all 12 keys, the home-position and alternate
pattern, the position name, and chord forms that the patterns correspond to.
This chart is handy to have in case you’re not sure of how to map a position