Today’s installment of the greatest songwriting compendium this side of Mordor deals with the issue of chromatic playing. Or rather, blues playing that masquerades as chromatic playing.
Chromatic Playing
This is actually a response to a video I watched on “chromatic playing”, an area of weakness that I was very much hoping to learn more about. Unfortunately, upon viewing the video, it turned out to be elementary blues rock infilling.
Blues Infilling
Since it seems some people are confusing blues rock infilling with “chromatic playing”, I’ve put together a little something something on some elementary blues rock playing that I have long labelled as “The Path of Least Resistance”. With a very small amount of modification, we can turn this into flash playing.
Flash Playing
Flash playing is another term I have long used, and have been meaning to expound on. Flash is playing that sounds fast, looks difficult, but uses relatively little skill to execute. Lots of hair metal bands played flash. Very few 80′s shredders actually had chops. Those are the ones we still here about today…
Breaking It Down
If you want to learn to add this to your repertoire, here’s how it works:
1. Navigate through the minor pentatonic scale so as to only move one step at a time on each string
2. Add the middle finger to make triplets that have that “Blues Rock” tonality
3. Overlap some positions in larger triplets to add some style and make the run last longer
This exercise can also be transferred to the major pentatonic position, but honestly, who plays major pentatonic?
