Guick Guide to Effortless Soloing through Chord Changes

Welcome to another episode of the Steve Stine Podcast, brought to you by GuitarZoom! Today, we dive into a fantastic technique to elevate your guitar solos, especially when navigating between chord changes. Host Steve Stine takes us through a method he calls "chord chasing," where you'll learn to seamlessly connect your solos to the chords you're playing. We'll explore the E major, C sharp minor, A major, and B major chords, and discuss how pentatonic scales can help you improvise more melodically. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned player, this episode is packed with practical tips to enhance your improvisation skills. So grab your guitar, and let's get started!

Links:

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Chapters

• 0:00 Visualizing E major pentatonic simplifies playing
• 5:48 Chord-following opportunities in pentatonic.

Transcript

Steve Stine [00:00:21]:
Hey, Steve Stine from GuitarZoom here. Thank you so much for joining me today. We're going to be doing is talking about how to improvise in between chord changes. I'm going to give you one really great, fairly simple idea that works really great. What we're going to do is we're going to look at these different chords. We're looking at E major, C sharp minor, A major and B major. Now you could play these anywhere on the fretboard. But what this is going to require is a little bit of scale knowledge.

Steve Stine [00:00:47]:
And we're just going to start off by looking at pentatonics. And we're going to do what I call chord chasing, which is really just as the chords move, we're going to play that pentatonic scale that relates to particular chord. So let's say for instance, we were looking at an E major chord. Now right above this fifth string bar chord. If I go here to the 12th fret of the sixth string, I've got the E major pentatonic scale. Okay. If you know your E major pentatonic. So what I do is I can visualize my fifth string bar chord right here and also visualize this position of the E major pentatonic and see that they're overlapping each other.

Steve Stine [00:01:28]:
Okay, so here's my E major pentatonic, here's my chord. So I can see that these notes right here being overlapped. Now I found just a visual shortcut for me instead of just visualizing this, which is perfect. I just, when I, when I descend here, I'm just dropping down into that root right there. And for me it just, it's a little bit easier because then I can think, I can just do that kind of slide to get into that position from the scale or from the chord. But I'm just visualizing this E major pentatonic is what I'm doing. So no matter where I would have a major fifth string bar chord, if I was on B major again, the B major is sitting right here, but I can see it right off of that. And now I'm in that position.

Steve Stine [00:02:26]:
So that's a really easy way of being able to find that when you're on the fifth string. So our first chord, I'm just looking at that as a fifth string major bar chord right there, E. So I could come up here and just do a little bit of filling with that E major pentatonic, whatever it is you like to do. Now the next chord in my sequence is C sharp minor. Now I could go to C Sharp minor, right here. And then see C sharp minor pentatonic right here, which is the same as E major pentatonic. It's the same scale, all right, so that would be just fine. So if I played something, you see, maybe I want to see the fifth string, C sharp minor, right here.

Steve Stine [00:03:20]:
Well, then I would want to see the pentatonic that coincides with that right down here. So it does require a knowledge of your pentatonic. Now, you might not need the entire scale, right? The entire shape, you might just need a little bit of it. But it's a really great way of just being able to fill quickly when you're moving from E. Or you could have done that up here, whatever works for you. And then here comes A major. Well, I could do A major as a fifth string bar chord, which is technically the open chord right here. So I could have done something there just like I did on E, right? Or I could have gone to the six string bar chord and just built off of that.

Steve Stine [00:04:06]:
Now it works the same way that the fifth string did, except when you get to this third string you're going to play, you're going to have to move back one fret, okay? So you might like that. You might instead want to play that. Whatever works for you. And then right after that I played a B major. So I'm just doing the same thing right above that. So let's put this together. So I've got my E major, C sharp minor here, or here A. Now you might think to yourself, well, why didn't I just stay in? If all these chords fit in the key of E major, which they do, why wouldn't I have just stayed in E major pentatonic the entire time? And you could.

Steve Stine [00:05:13]:
What this is doing is it's just offering you a little bit of a different opportunity to try and follow these chords around. So the notes that you're playing within that pentatonic are geared more toward the chord and the connection of that chord versus just playing the same notes all the time. Because again, one of the problems that people run into when they play like this. So over E, over C sharp minor A, you know, nothing sounds different. It all sounds the same. Where if you do it this way, the beauty of this is it doesn't matter what chord you'd go to. You could go to a chord that doesn't fit and still follow it. You could go to a, you know, an F major chord and still be able to follow that wherever you go.

Steve Stine [00:05:59]:
Or you might have gone to, you know, I don't know, C sharp minor, which doesn't. Or let's say D minor, which doesn't fit. But you could have still followed that by playing the pentatonic. Or if, you know, diatonic, you know, you could have followed like that or something like that. So there's lots of cool ways of doing that. If the progression was a little bit faster, you just got to shorten everything up. Now if you weren't playing both rhythm, maybe you're just playing the solo. You could be or just kind of copying over the top.

Steve Stine [00:06:45]:
Your guitar player, other guitar players playing the E, 1, 2, 3, 4. Now, you don't again have to play that much. You might just do a little rhythmic motif, if you will. We're gonna play 3, 4. It might be just something very small like that that you're adding almost like a kind of doo wop bass line, if you will. There's lots of different things that you could do. So thanks for watching. Do me a favor.

Steve Stine [00:07:36]:
If you're looking for in person, you know, guitar lessons, we now at GuitarZoom have the GuitarZoom Academy available. So all you need to do is head over to guitarzoom.com and check that out.