 Guitar and Excel, C major, A minor, pentatonic scale fret number seven, fingering. Get ready and some coffee. You're gonna need it because unlocking the fretboard is kind of like that time I got locked out of my house, which was a problem, but after a while I finally figured it out, which wasn't very helpful considering I really needed to figure a way in. Now I mean obviously I was able to get out with little to no figuring. Getting out was the easy part, however I needed to call a locksmith to figure my way in and now I get to be like that savior, the locksmith, but with like helping you figure your way into the fretboard. So you're no longer out in the cold scratching up the wood in a vain hope that your dog will suddenly learn how to let you in but then totally forget how he did it right afterwards so we can't let himself out to terrorize the mailman tomorrow. So anyways, let's get into it. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook that's okay because we basically built this from a blank worksheet but did so in prior presentation so if you want to build this from a blank worksheet you could start back there. However, you don't necessarily need access to this workbook if looking at this from a music theory standpoint because we'll simply use it as a tool to map out the fretboard, give us the notes to scale the chords that we're focused in on. If you do have access to this workbook though there's a bunch of tabs on down below including the OG Orange tab representing the original worksheet we put together in a prior section mapping out the entire fretboard giving us our entire musical alphabet in letter format, number format, combining letter and number format having a key that can be adjusted with the green cell adjusting the scale that we are in in the worksheets on the right which provide the notes in the scale, the chord constructions from those notes and interval information. We're now looking at the key of C, we started out looking at open position from the standpoint of constructing the chords and those are going to be all of the yellow tabs at this time. So we started with the one chord, the C chord, mapped it out open position, frets one through three then we went to the four chord, the F major, the five chord, the G major, back to the two chord, the D minor, the three chord, the E minor, the six chord, the A minor and then the seven that diminished. Then we wanted to jump to the middle and think about the middle of the fretboard not from chord constructions but this time starting from a scale standpoint and we started on fret number five and we looked at it in detail from a pentatonic standpoint and major scale standpoint and then we saw how we can possibly tie in to our open positions targeting a C, targeting the F, targeting the D minor, targeting the E, targeting the A. Now we want to move to the next position on the fretboard so we started here on position number five in the middle. Well we talked about open position here in terms of chords and then we jumped into our scales and we jumped into the middle of the fretboard so that we can think about the middle in terms of scales and then later on we'll do the caged system to tie these things together and think about it more in depth with chords so we're kind of overlapping the same stuff but looking at it from different angles. Now the question is once we start in the middle of the guitar which way should we go? We could go up the guitar or we can go back to the guitar behind it because we started and we called this position one or the G shape here and we're going to continue on going up the guitar because we've already learned a little bit on this back position in frets zero through three with the open chord positions. So we're going to go up the guitar and then after we've continued up the guitar we will then go back behind this position one number one and kind of relearn what we did over here from a chords standpoint but now in a scale standpoint and then we'll do the caged system which means we'll take the chords stuff that we learned here and push them up again and talk about the whole thing basically again but this time emphasizing the caged system which is basically based on the chords. So that's what we're going to do now we'll populate this shape and then we'll talk about the fingering of the pentatonic and then next time we'll do a similar thing but then be looking at the full major shape in the second position. So last time we left off here so I want to just copy this sheet over and make the adjustments just so you can see if you're following sheet by sheet here. So I'm going to pull down control drag this to the right of the OG and there's our starting point and I'm going to call this the scale fret seven fingering tab and then I'll make that maybe yellow or the light blue. Okay so what we're going to do is I'm going to unhide some cells between I and AK so we can see the next position right click and unhide. So this is what we had last time I'm going to copy that and I'm going to put it over to here so this is going to be our new position now there it is I'm going to make this yellow so we can see the overlap going to go to the to the home let's go to the shape tab so my voice is cracking let's go to the outline and make it yellow so there we have it pull these down for now and so there is our next shape so note that it's going to start up we're getting kind of high up on the guitar neck at this point because it's going to start over once we get to the twelve but I'm going to hide from right after the shape on fret eleven back to our worksheet so here's our worksheet I'm going to right click and hide so there we have it now notice we have side by side here the major worksheet and then the over here we have the minor the related minor which is going to be or the Aeolian mode if you want to call it that the six is now the one when we consider this pentatonic shape those are the two modes that are everything is included we'll talk more about that in a second now let's just do the worksheet down here this is the entire scale down below it has the pentatonic and then the major then the pentatonic on top of it let's actually redo this worksheet at this time as well so I'm going to just redo this whole thing I'm going to try this again I'm going to unhide from K to AK and let's say unhide and then let's take this whole thing this time and I'm going to hide from here to my worksheet right click and hide and then let's I'll just do the whole thing I'll make this a little bit smaller and I'm going to remove the conditional formatting and then just basically redo it here so I'm going to say let's take this whole thing and then go to the home tab conditional formatting clear the rules rules are cleared I'm going to clear the rules over here no rules but it'll be anarchy without any rules but I know but we're going to make new rules like right after we clear out the other rules don't worry it's going to be okay craziness is going to happen people are going to start robbing grocery stores and stuff so I can't get any food if you stop all the rules okay we're going to put rules we're going to put rules back in here hold on a second so we're going to say let's take this whole thing and we're going to say home tab drop down and then this is going to be a C let's make it all blue to start off with this is going to be our major and C major just like we did before so I'm going to fill make the underline the base blue the bottom part blue and then we're going to say D everything is going to be blue custom blue blue blue and then we're going to say do do do make an E make that blue do do do do and then boom we're going to go to the F make that blue boom boom boom boom and then the G we're going to the G we're going to make that blue and there it is and then again we're going to say the A and we will make that blue okay and then one more time on the B so we'll make that blue do do do so now you can see this is going to be the same scale we were working at before and now we're going to have this here in our new shape this would be the entire scale not just the five notes but having the whole seven notes and let's make this one yellow so this is our outline on the yellow alright so now I'm just going to put the pentatonic on top of it and make it the green notes and the pentatonic being three out of the six notes will fit on top of it perfectly so we're going to say now we'll put on top of it the green ones which will fit on top perfecto just like Mundo would do it my friend Mundo is a perfectionist so I like to say that's where I came up with this phrase that no one's ever said before perfecto Mundo because it's perfecto just like my perfectionist friend Mundo would do it so then we're going to say this one is going to be an E and then it's going to be an E and then the next one is going to be a G and then and then the next one finally will be the B oh not the B, an A okay hopefully I got that correct so now we have those so now we have those being the pentatonic here was our classic shape the pentatonic last time and so now you can kind of see how it overlaps here and we can see the pentatonic as well as the added two shapes now being blue okay we'll get into that more next time now let's go back up to the top and just consider the pentatonic itself so I'm going to hide from L on over to the AJ right click and hide and then I'm going to go into full screen mode so there we have it let's get this as large as we can and the full screen mode it's basically pretty good right there I think so last time here was our shape so that's in position 5 so we've learned basically in open position we've learned this whole kind of space over here but we learned it with chords and if we put all those chords together we'll basically end up with the major shape that we saw down here the blue one and so then we moved up to starting in position 5 which is a bit of a jump but it's a great place to start your pentatonics and we learned the classic pentatonic shape and then we learned the major shape on top of it so now we can go to what we would call I would call shape number 2 now remember defining these shapes can be a bit of a trick a lot of people will call this first shape like a G type shape it's not because it's always going to be a G chord but because you have this G shape over here and you can imagine that if you stack around it the added couple notes a G has three notes in it two more notes is the pentatonic so if I was to move that up here I could say well that now is a C because I'm looking at this that's going to be a C but I can say it's a G shape similar to that G shape and I can then tag my chord or my pentatonic shape on top of it by saying adding those two notes and then I can add on top of that my major shape if I want to but be careful because although this structure this shape is unique to the pentatonic and the chord it's not unique to the major shape once we have seven notes you can have multiple shapes that this fits into so that's what I mean by you can label the shape the chord which will then still be unique to the pentatonic and then you can say that I'm trying to label the major shape based on that even though it will fit into that chord will fit into multiple of these major kind of shapes so then when I move up to this one so now we're basically we have this overlap that's what this little chart down here is trying to show that we have the overlap between these two positions and then we're going to jump up to this position one of the benefits of jumping up here is we're not jumping up notice again I'm not going from like here's my four string position I'm not going from pointer to pinky here's my pinky and then starting where my pointer is from the last position I'm starting in the middle I'm only going up two frets here's my first position I'm just going to go up to here and that's basically where our next position will start now on the pentatonic it's a little bit weird on the second shape because we don't have that B so I'm actually going to start here but on the major shape these two you know it would be connected there okay so that's going to be and that's the general idea and now we're in the second shape so let's actually move this down now I'm going to move this down and take it out so we can just focus on that one shape and then so this one we can call that a G shape so we can call this I would call it shape number two which is fairly common but not a universal term you can also call it basically an E shape and you can see the E if you were to say let's do this with the reds I think because the yellow was my if I took my E shape so now it's a C chord but it's got our E shape which looks like this and this is a classic major bar chord type of shape so you can see that inside of it so we're going we're going and then doing our shape right there which would give us that C major chord so you can you can tag it and that's one way to kind of memorize this shape so then if you're playing this to try to learn the coloring of it then obviously the starting point will typically be that we're going to be playing it up and down that's what everybody basically starts off doing I'm going to make one more of these but make it like orange could I make it orange getting crazy on my colors I want to go and make the fill outline orange so it's something different so now so you could do the whole shape from top to bottom of course you also want to kind of learn I would pick up little pieces of the shape and and try to learn little pieces and as you do it you want to get your mind into thinking what exactly am I playing here am I playing something that I'm thinking about in the key of C or do I think about it as one of the related as the related minor or am I thinking about it in one of the different modes now remember that on the pentatonic all these notes will only fit into basically the C and it's related minor the six right because these other chords have been constructed they've all been constructed from seven notes not five notes but it just so happens it works out that the one and the six are the two that fit perfectly into this pentatonic so it's common to think about the pentatonic as related to the C or it's related minor now it's also common remember to think about any of these other ones if I go to a D like this for example then I still might be using my pentatonic shapes but then adding the note that I need to instead of switching my mind to going to the complete major scale a lot of people will still think about themselves in a pentatonic but then say I'm going to add the note that I need to add the F if I want to add basically that note in this case because the F is not in the pentatonic and that way you can kind of keep your mind in the pentatonic and just make adjustments to it which actually works fairly well because the pentatonic is a more flexible scale oftentimes or you can kind of switch your mind to thinking now I'm thinking in a major scale as opposed to the pentatonic so we can play this basically top to bottom a lot of people when they do that you're going to start your fingers oftentimes if you were using your positioning you'd want as much as possible one finger on each fret so it's you're going to be tempted to start here like this with a C it's not actually bad to do that because later on you will do that most of the time a lot of the time because that's going to be the root if you're thinking about yourself in C major and it's and you can get hammer-ons and stuff like this and you can reach up to this string up here for the third so in practice you'll often kind of do that but if you're trying to keep your hand in position to have one finger per fret which is probably the best starting point then you're going to be wanting to play this with your middle finger so and also note if I start on this note right here I'm going to think of myself as playing in the key of C because I'm starting from a C if you're going to think of yourself playing in the key of A then you probably want to start here right and then move into your shape because by by doing that you're starting your progression on an A and even though they're all the same notes it's going to sound more like an A and you can kind of get your register of mind to say okay now I'm playing an A scale so it's the same kind of thing you're still going to be just playing the scale up and back but if you just put that little piece of information in your mind you're like okay I'm playing basically a C versus I'm playing an A minor you could do the same thing in a different mode right you could basically say I'm playing in the Dorian mode and start on the D and what you really want to do is start all of your lines to begin and end on the D so as you go through this for example here I'm thinking about myself in the key of C I'm going boom boom that's my first line and let's actually pull this down so we can see it one by one and then we're going to here and I'm going to do I can't do without my pick boom boom and then we're going to the next line is going to be boom boom now notice when I ended off there you're at the end of the C so you might first you know you think of that in your mind that you're playing around again so then if I'm starting out again you might even play this one as the one again and then we're going to go boom boom I'm switching to this finger now and then the last bit here now that's probably not the the best spot to end with because you kind of want to end on a D so you might end back and then end it back by going back to the C here why because I'm trying to keep all of my lines so that I begin and end them on the C so you kind of so you want to basically target the C here and then basically go through your scale in such a way that you're ending and beginning on a C so if I'm going to start from the bottom I might start on a C go back up and back down right so that I'm clearly have my ear in the key of C and then from here down and then from here we go down and then from here we go down and then you might end it there because now I've ended on a C again and then I'm going to keep going down I might start it down to here and then next line and then the next line and now I've ended on the C so just that little piece of information I used to when I first started doing this I didn't really do that because I had this thing when I first started playing I was kind of experimenting if I could learn everything with just shapes, relative kind of shapes with having very little musical learning all of the notes I just thought that was kind of interesting at the time and it was kind of interesting but that's not the way you actually want to do it typically because if you just introduce you need to know at least your targeting notes that you're starting and ending on and if you play your scale saying okay I can see that I'm playing in the key of C and I start and end on a C you're going to start to tune your ear to kind of know what that sounds like and you're going to be doing your fingering so that you know not just the shape from top to bottom I don't just know that it's called the two shape of a pentatonic I know where to start it and end it to at least make it in the key of C and then we can start targeting our notes more when we get into the we can start targeting each of these notes within that scale now just a quick reminder on the rules for the pentatonic it's a seven note scale that we it's a five note scale because we took the seven note scale and removed the two notes or you can think of the seven note scale as a five note scale plus the two notes and when we look in a position the thing that's great about it in these chunky positions that we're breaking out the fretboard into is you have certain rules those rules being that we never have on one string more than four frets wide of a position that's one rule that's perfect for your hand position so I'm never stretching out here which gets very difficult for people that don't have really large hands my hands aren't huge that's a stretch for me to do so that's one benefit of a pentatonic type of shape position which you can think of is that we're going to have notes that are going to be right next to each other those are the ones that have been removed right so we don't see any notes any half steps so we know when I'm playing a pentatonic like I know it's not going to be that right I know it's like if I'm starting on a pentatonic here it's going to be a jump to here or it's going to be a long jump to there so that's another thing that's useful to know we know that we have basically two kinds of steps once I plant my first finger once I plant my first finger on this side then it's either going to be a short position like you could think of it kind of like Morse code it's either going to be a short or a long so it's either going to be this is the short it's one whole step or two notes up and this is the long which are going to be skipping two notes going to be two three steps up one two steps up right so this so that there's my short there's the long there's the short I mean there's a long there's another short there's the short there's the short right so and these positions will actually kind of move together you can see that that they're kind of clumping together here there's the two shorts there's the two shorts there's in our prior position the longs here are the longs basically in this position so you can start to memorize that shape as basically kind of a jigsaw type puzzle which gets pretty easy you know pretty easier to visualize than when you put in those half steps and you have kind of those rules that can help you out a little bit as you go now the next thing we might want to do is look at the look at it in terms of an A now if I was to play the same thing as an A I probably don't want to start playing on the C right I probably want to start on my A I want to get that A bass in my ear and now think okay I'm playing in the key of A minor now that's why when people learn this first shape they play in A minor because they're starting on that A and that's why a lot of people learn A or one reason instead of instead of in the key of C but if I started on the C then I can use the same shape and say now it's in the C major that was on our prior shape now if I'm playing this shape then if I start here I'm basically playing in the key of C major but if I want to switch my ear just to continue the shape it's the same notes the same notes were in this shape as in this shape I can play it in C major or in A minor but if I start on that C it's going to sound like it's going to be in C major which is fine if that's what you want to do but if you want to count it up like you're in the minor then you probably want to go back and grab that B and then move up right there's the one and then move up and then we just go right back up the thing again and then I'm just going to go do I'll do this slowly again just so we can see the shape boom and then we can go to here and we'll pick up the A and you can see that ends kind of the first round and then you can go through it again A to the C and then the D to the E and then when you go up to these high ones you're going to be tempted and oftentimes I do this you know I'll switch up to this finger because that's easier to play but if you want to be in position you want to use these fingers kind of depends what you're doing if you're doing more bluesy kind of stuff you're going to start to change those rules because it's not just about playing the note it's about doing something with it oftentimes so if you want to if I want to get like a hammer on it's a lot easier to do that not from the pinky but from the pointer to the pinky so you're going to start to do things like starting up here that's why I'm kind of hesitating to go too fast because I'm going to do things that are not exactly the proper thing but if you're down here and you start to bend the strings a little bit it's a whole lot easier to do that if you shift your fingering up so this is the proper way to do it but if you're trying to do a hammer on or do something fast down here then you're probably going to be shifting your finger up a little bit so don't really be afraid to do that some people will get very technical on that depends what you're doing I mean I suppose if you're I don't have any background like classical guitar but if they were I would think that in a classical guitar they would want the position to be proper most of the time and have your finger back so that you can reach all of the notes that you need to reach whereas if you're doing something that's more like a bluesy kind of thing then you're going to probably do things that are unorthodox so that you can get a different sound because now you're trying to spend a lot more time possibly doing something with the note as opposed to just trying to make it ring out beautifully so you end up switching your finger up a little bit so that's the main thing now you can do that with any of the other modes too I can play the same thing up from the D and I can say well now I'm in the Dorian well if I'm going to think of myself in Dorian I'm going to say the same thing it's all the same notes that I'm in D Dorian but I'm not going to start on the C then I'm going to start on this D and then I'm going to play it up and I'm going to try to focus in on the D's as I go up the strings so that's one thing to keep in mind then of course you can practice when you practice this most people are going to practice from top to bottom and you probably will do it sometimes when you're not thinking about what you're just practicing the fingering but then you might practice little bits of it to get to it more musically so if I'm seeing myself in the key of C I might start saying what can I do with this shape I have a double stop up here because I can play these two strings at the same time and here's my A over here maybe I can go back to that sometimes here's my power chord from C to G notice I'm cheating up here I'm playing it out of position because that's what I typically do when I go up and here I can play those two I can play a power chord we've also got the third back here so if you play this little shape you've got the one and the three so you've got your one and five up there I'm trying not to hit some notes that are in the major shape because all these notes would be in the major and just stick to the pentatonic here you can also go back and pick up some notes back here and the shape that we learned before and lead them in so then we can then go down to the next one and learn it bit by bit so notice that as I go to the next bit right here I've got this these if I start playing it like that it's going to start to sound like I'm in something in the key of E right which you could do because you can think of yourself as the related mode of C major that starts on A but if you want to keep your sound that if you're in the key of C you want to kind of be mindful of those things I could start here's my C down here now if I want to do some double stops with this I'm probably going to cheat on my shape right I'm probably not going to play this with my pinky up top I'm probably going to jump up here and play it like this so that I can get those two strings at the same time you're probably going to do that if you want to do some bending or anything like that as well other way of course you can keep yourself in the key of C if that's what you want to play you can start with this little shape which gives you the root and the third and now that you're using the key of C then focus in on this bit and then possibly end with that same little structure or you can go back into your prior shape find a C down here practice some sliding up and back and that kind of stuff and then obviously you can do this on each of each of your shapes you can go down to each of your shapes restrict your position so that you're fingering just that little bit if you go down here notice this shape okay am I playing the key of C where's going to be the C to pick up the C is actually way down here so it might be a little bit more difficult to kind of keep that in the key of C since that's like the highest note in here but if you're like notice I kind of cheat it down here because again if you want to keep yourself in position you'd be doing something like that but oftentimes I'll be moving up here and I'll move my finger up because that's just so much easier to do if you're trying to do something else like bend these or something like that so again that might not be the most proper thing to do but you can play with your own methods in terms of when do you want to keep your fingers in position and when do you think it's appropriate to move up so that you can you can bend and do things like that it's going to be largely dependent on what kind of style that you want to play but there is value to thinking of it like I'm trying to play everything with each finger in its place that's useful to do that's probably the best place to start not the place I started but probably the best place to start and then start to mess up your fingering in a logical way to do exactly what you're trying to do what you're trying to do with it now then of course you can go back up and you can do the same kind of thing in like in the key of A so if I'm thinking of myself in the key of A then I might start back here and then move into my shape so then I'm ending right here so I'm in A minor I'm in the related minor so now I'm going to be over here so I'm playing around this A that's going to be right in here so I'm going to start off the targeting just like we did last time in future presentations but anytime you're kind of noodling around and just kind of learning it if you played a little bit more musically and know the note that you're kind of targeting around even as you chunk this down it would be good now obviously last time we went all the way from open position and then to position starting in fret 5 fret 7 but that's a little bit more difficult to do sometimes we're going to start possibly to talk about lines pathways that we can use to go from possibly open position to this position we also want to be thinking about the connections here between these two positions 5 or the 5th fret or what I would call position 1 or the G shape position and position 2 we'll do that more in following presentations next time we'll go in and we'll put the added two notes to get the full major scale or maybe next time we'll talk about the intervals and then we'll do the major scale and then eventually we'll get to those targeting of the notes and trying to find a pathway from open position to position 1 to then position 2