About the Guitar Lesson
Welcome to video four in the series, How to Play Over a Dominant Seventh Chord. In this free lesson, you take a look at combining scales and mixing major and minor.
In the first three parts of this video series, you look at using three different scales: the dominant scale, the major pentatonic, and the minor pentatonic. When you combine and mix these scales, you make lead lines with chromatic movement that is important to many styles of popular music, especially rock, blues, country, and jazz.
To see how this works, first play the major pentatonic. Next, play the minor pentatonic. Finally, play through the notes of BOTH scales. By combining the major and minor pentatonic, you get a scale that features degrees 1-2-b3-3-4-5-6-b7. You can take this one step further by adding in a b5th from the blues scale too.
In addition to this combination of notes including the major and minor pentatonic, it also has all the notes from the dominant scale. This hybrid scale is used in blues, country, and jazz, and sometimes called the Mixolydian-blues scale, which is the dominant scale, Mixolydian mode, with the minor blues scale’s b3rd and b5th added to it.
About the Educator & Series
In this series of four, free guitar lessons, you see how to play over a dominant seventh chord. The scales and scale combinations featured here are used in music styles such as pop, rock, blues, country, folk, and jazz. This information is suitable for intermediate level players and up, who are already familiar with pentatonic and major scale patterns. Be sure to follow along using the free guitar tab that corresponds to the examples. You can play on any type of acoustic or electric, six string guitar in standard tuning.