 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential, my name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com. In this video today we're going to be talking about how to play a guitar solo with just four notes and the concept of phrasing. Phrasing is a very under discussed topic with new players, many players just learn scales and think that will give them the right gateway into being a great lead guitar player and that is partially true but you do have to go down the rabbit hole of phrasing in order to really nail down how you're going to play. So in this video we're going to explore just that. So all the tones you're hearing in this video are coming from the Blackstar Silverline Standard which is mic'd with the Lute Audio LCT 440 condenser mic and I'm using this Jackson Adrian Smith SDX guitar today as well. The scale I'm going to be using to demonstrate this concept is the A minor pentatonic scale. This is usually the first scale most people learn on their road to lead guitar playing but phrasing is something that they don't often talk about in the early stages but this is very very important. So what is phrasing? Phrasing is not the notes you play but it's how you play them and the whole idea in this video is we're going to look at the concept of taking just four notes and playing a guitar solo with those four notes. So this is something that I'm going to talk about and then demonstrate to you guys over a jam track at the end of the video and then I want you guys to go away and try this yourself. This concept works in any key with any scale but I will focus this on the A minor pentatonic today because that is often the first scale people use when they first start playing guitar. So if you've started learning scales and you started learning lead guitar you may find that in the early stages your lead guitar playing sounds like this which is very very linear it's very much in the scale and running up and down the scale but really what I want to achieve is this which is much more fluid much more expressive and dynamic it moves more and the notes kind of flow into each other in a different way but we always get stuck as guitar players in that very rigid linear way of playing scales. Phrasing is the one thing that will get you guys out of that and all we need are four notes. So we're going to explore a concept here of writing a guitar solo or just jamming a guitar solo with these four notes. So that is just the fifth and seventh frets on the D and G which is from my minor pentatonic. Now you can use any pairing of notes throughout the entire scale you can even try this out yourself in different places I just think that's a great place to start but you could apply the same principle to the B and E strings or the B and G. Anyway you can take four notes from the scale you can use this concept. So what we're going to do is we're going to take those four notes and we're going to play over a track and we're just going to explore what we can do with four notes. So within this I'm going to be using all my techniques so at this point it's a great time to brush up on your techniques so I'm going to be using hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, string bends and vibrato. So between those four notes and those techniques I should be able to get quite a wide variety of things going. Now the important thing to remember when you start thinking about phrasing is not to play every note the same length so instead of playing every note like this even if I add technique to that it can still sound linear. What I'm going to do is I want to break up those note lengths a bit so let some notes hang or cut some notes short so for instance if you're doing a hammer-on try going a bit quicker or if you're doing a string bend really hold that bend do some quick pull-offs or some slow pull-offs. Don't be afraid to double up on things like I did on that slide there double slide or a double bend or even multiple hammer-ons and pull-offs. Play around with note length because note length is essentially the flow of the notes you're hearing. If you think about how a singer would sing a song a singer is not going to sing every word like that. They're going to flow with their voice their voice and the melody they sing is going to move so apply that same thinking to your note lengths allow certain notes to breathe and hang out and allow other notes to be cut short and also don't be afraid of space in a lick you could do a hammer-on and you don't have to hold that note until you play the next note I could go and I could use that space as part of my flow. The important thing with this and all phrasing and all improvisation is that it's very context-based so when you're putting space into something the space is only sort of working in the context of what you're playing it over. If you're just playing it completely on its own like I'm doing right now it almost sounds a little bit stop-start and a little bit kind of all over the place but as soon as you put that to a track the track fills in those gaps in your playing so it sort of develops your musical sensibilities and your ability to hear what a track needs as well. The other thing that's worth considering is dynamics. Dynamics is how intense or loud or soft something is when you're playing it so you don't have to pick every note as hard as you possibly can. You can pick harder for notes you really want to jump out and really want to emphasize and you can pick softer for notes you want to just sort of flow into the background a bit more and have a more subtle sound. You can also use the pickup switch on your guitar so I'm going to go between the bridge pickup and whatever other pickups I want just to demonstrate some different sounds here so I've got a five-way switch on this guitar so if I'm playing aggressively I'd probably lean on that bridge pickup but then if I want to play subtly I might switch to position four which is the neck and middle position on this guitar. You can hear how the pickup choice there actually affects the dynamic of what I'm playing. I can play aggressively on position four but it sounds more aggressive on position one. So use your guitar's tonal capabilities as well to aid your phrasing so just to recap before I demonstrate this concept pick four notes from the scale I've used the A minor pentatonic first position but you can use whatever scale you want in whatever key you want just pick four notes play those four notes over the track for as long as you want I'm just going to go for about a minute or so just to give you an idea of what's going on here but you could extend this for an hour if you wanted to with those four notes and only those four notes because that's the whole point here we're doing a guitar solo with just four notes you're going to use all your techniques so hammer-ons pull-offs slides vibrato string bends on just four notes don't stray outside of those four notes that's the important thing here and then listen listen to the track listen to the context use space use dynamics use differences in speed so play some slower phrases play some faster phrases but still sticking with those four notes the reason the four notes is important is because if we think about our scale as a whole it's very easy to get kind of absorbed in the idea that I have to play all of these notes and really the trick with being a great lead player and a great improviser is having that melodic sensibility and almost like a vocal quality to it so a singer when they sing a song isn't just going to be doing runs all over the place from low to high high to low using every note in their range they're going to be picking and choosing the right points to use the right notes and I think we should be using some of that sensibility in guitar playing as well so listen to the track this will develop your musical hearing listen to the context and basically try and think about what does the track need so the exercise for you guys to try is to pick a track whatever key you want whatever style you want pick four notes from whatever scale you want throw all your technique in there and just jam on those four notes and basically see how many different combinations you can come up with even though you're just going to be playing four notes it's surprising how many variations you can do on those four notes and when you put that into context over a track you can come up with some really cool results so there is an introduction to phrasing for you guys it's very much a conceptual based idea so there's a lot to think about here and a lot to sort of take away and just brainstorm in your own playing so I'm now going to go and play this over a backing track using just those four notes we talked about I'm going to show you how many different sort of combinations of notes and ways to phrase four notes you can do over a track and then you guys can try that yourself with whichever jam tracks you want so let me know down below in the comments how you guys have gotten on with that concept and how your phrasing is coming on as a guitar player don't forget to check out black star amplification on youtube for more free video lessons just like this and if you're looking for a guitar teacher in your local area don't forget to check out musicteacher.com there's a great network of teachers all around the country waiting to help you guys out I'm going to jam out over a track now with just four notes now it's time for you guys to write your own four note guitar solo thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon