Every scale book tells you which notes. This one tells you which note now.
A scale is a set of notes and a chord is an argument about which of them matter this bar. Every page here draws the same scale once for each chord of the progression it is played over — the twelve-bar for the pentatonics and the blues, the axis for everything else — with every note marked by what it does against that chord.
What is in it
• Eleven scales in twelve keys — major, the six modes, harmonic minor, both pentatonics and the blues scale.
• One neck per chord, the same position every time: your hand does not move, the targets do.
• Four marks, all of them shapes — land, pass, lean, bend — so the page reads the same in ink, on an e-reader and in a photocopy. A legend on every page lists only the marks that page draws.
• The changes, as bars, and one thing to do: loop them, play one note a bar, and hear the chord arrive underneath a note you chose before it did.
The bend is the point. Over a dominant chord your scale's b3 sits a half-step under the chord's major third, and pushing it up into that third is the sound of the blues. It is marked with a rising tick, and it fires only where a scale with a b3 meets a chord with a 3 and a b7 — the I7 and the V7, not the IV7 — which this book shows rather than tells.
What it is not. Not a lesson in phrasing and not a rule: one position a page, the lowest the scale offers, so everything marked is something you can do with your own hand where it already is.
132 chapters. Eleven scales, twelve keys, standard tuning.
For players who know their boxes and freeze when the chord changes, and for anyone who has been told to "play the changes" and never been shown what that means on the neck.
