Posts tagged: guitar solo

September 7, 2010

How to Add Variety to Your Guitar Solos with a Cool Japanese Minor Pentatonic Scale Part 1

categories Guitar Scales | comments 0 Comments
Welcome back!

In today’s lesson, we will look at a cool Japanese minor pentatonic scale you can add to your guitar soloing toolkit.

This cool scale will add variety and a fresh sound to your guitar solos.

The Japanese minor pentatonic scale we will look at is called the Hirajoshi scale.

First, let’s examine its construction:

So to build this scale, you would take the major scale and lower the third and sixth notes (degrees) by one semitone each.

You also need to drop out the 4th and 7th degrees.

Let’s say you want to build an A Hirajoshi scale.

First take the A major scale:

Second, lower the 3rd and 6th scale degrees by one semitone each:

Third, you drop out the 4th and 7th degrees:



Your result is:

So, an A Hirajoshi scale consists of the following notes:

A         B            C            E            F

One other way to build this scale is to simply take the minor scale and drop out the 4th and 7th  degrees.  When you build the Hirajoshi scale from the natural minor scale, you don’t have to lower any notes.  You just need to drop out the 4th and 7th  degrees.

Since the Hirajoshi scale is simply a minor scale with the 4th and 7th notes omitted, it means you could use this scale where you normally use a natural minor scale.

Now it’s time to take a look at one of the ways to play the A Hirajoshi scale:

Practice this scale forwards and backwards:

In part 2 of this post we will look at additional ways to practice this scale, a chord vamp that you can use to practice soloing with this scale, and we will look at creating your own solo with this scale.

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March 9, 2010

At Last! Randy Rhoads’ “Crazy Train” Isolated Track with Guitar Solo

categories Guitar Technique | comments 0 Comments

Wow, this is really cool.

The Metal Den has come across an isolated guitar track of Crazy Train from Ozzy Osbourne’s album the Blizzard of Ozz featuring the late great Randy Rhoads.

If you love to play this song or have always wanted to play it, you’ve got to check out this isolated guitar track.

I remember when I was first learning to play guitar, this was the third guitar solo I learned.  I don’t remember exactly how long it took me to learn the song and guitar solo, but I do remember practically locking myself in my room for weeks learning and practicing it.

Man if I would have had this isolated track back then!

Here’s the link for the isolated Crazy Train guitar track.

By the way, they’ve also got an isolated track for Mr Crowley, also from the Blizzard of Ozz album.  This too is another classic guitar song and guitar solo .  Here is the link for the Mr Crowley isolated guitar track.

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