G Major Scale and Song 4

Welcome to day 4 of this free 10 day lead guitar challenge!

In this lesson, we'll learn the G major scale and continue to work on picking technique and coordination skills. We'll then learn the lead part from the song 'Sally Cinnamon' by The Stone Roses!

The main focus and challenge presented for this lesson, is how to take a scale and use it as a kind of musical language. The Stone Roses and many other bands in this genre do this really well, where riffs and leads lines become words and sentences, which we use to make the guitar sing!

Lead part - G major scale

The fretboard diagram below shows the first 5 notes of the G major scale and these notes are all used for this catchy lead riff. The first diagram details the intervals and the second shows the note names.

We can break down the lead part into sections, as so:

• Starting with the first note of the scale, open 3rd string (note 1)

• Straight to the highest note, 3rd fret of the 2nd string (5)

• We then walk back through the scale 1st fret of the 2nd string (4) to the open 2nd string (3)

The next section is a repeated line on the 2nd string:

• 1st fret - open - 1st fret - open - 1st fret - open

• OR, 4 - 3 - 4 - 3 - 4 - 3

• Then, 2nd fret of string 3 (2)

And repeat! But first...

Before playing along to the looper in the video even at half speed or attempting to the original recording, we want to get the riff sounding really good.

The best way of doing that for this particular challenge, is to focus on the G major scale. Try to:

• Play G major scale with nice and even spaces between each note

• Make sure every note sounds out really well

• Play through the scale down and up!

Appreciating the scales behind the lead parts will definitely help to make learning things quicker and easier. The framework of notes that we know how to play through, forwards and backwards, will be there to support our playing.

Recap

• We have learnt and played a classic example of simple but fantastic song writing and lead line work

• Approached the G major scale with a view to further our musical language

• Learnt the G major down and back up to get our lead lines sounding amazing!

The half way point of this 10 day lead guitar course is up next! Day 5 takes us higher up the guitar neck for another classic song and great lead guitar work!