Transcripts
1. Promotional - Introduction : Hi. My name is Chuck
Malar and I've been a professional musician and
teacher for over 26 years. Throughout my career,
I've guided over 110,000 students from around the world and mastering
their instruments. My experience as a head
trainer at a company, recognized by Forbes, CES, S Choir, good housekeeping, US News, and even as a JD Power and
associates Award winner. This course, Bluegrass
improv Mastery, guitar, mandolin,
fiddle, and beyond. You don't need any prior
improv experience, just a passion for music, and a willingness to
explore new horizons. We'll start with the basics, introducing you to the G scale and building up from there. You'll uncover the secrets
behind bilinear playing, mastering rhythm changes and dive into the magic
of arpeggios, intervals, and
pentatonic scales. By the end of this course, you'll confidently
improvise in the key of G, whether you're playing
guitar, mandolin, fiddle, Dobro or any
instrument that calls you. Learn to create captivating
leads that stand out in any Bluegrass Jam
session and develop techniques that you can apply
across all musical styles. This course is for
musicians of all levels, whether you're just starting out or looking to
refine your skills. It's not about learning
notes and scales. It's about understanding the
foundation of improvisation, unlocking your creativity, and expressing yourself
through music. Or your class project, I encourage you to record your self improvising
in the Key of G, using the techniques
you've learned. Reflect on your
progress and share how this course has helped you enhance your
improvisational skills. This project is your
opportunity to showcase your growth and inspire others in their own
musical journeys. So if you are ready to deep dive into the world of
Bluegrass improvisation, I'll see you inside.
2. Overview Improvisation on any Instrument Music Theory Class: Hi. My name is Chuck. What we're going
to be learning in this course is what
makes up the key of g for bluegrass when playing
out of four, four time. How to improvise and how to
improvise out of G major, G major pentatonic,
G minor pentatonic, and how to practice all of these things that we
learn in the course with easy to use backing tracks that are all
calibrated to be slow, too fast, and everywhere in between so that you have
an easy time practicing so you can practice your
skills and learn how to be a pro and improvising in the key of G while
playing Bluegrass.
3. Quick Introduction to the G Scale For Bluegrass Improvisation: We're going to be
discussing the key of G while playing
Bluegrass in 44 time. I've written out some
of these notes here. What we're seeing is the staff, the staff has five lines, this trouble cleft here
and one of the sharps. In this video, we're
assuming that we know a little bit
about music theory. This isn't a music
theory lesson, but we're going to go over
some basics of it to get a good idea or a basis on
what we do and how we do. We're starting out
with these notes. G, A, B, C E F sharp and G, and I've written them out here. G A, B, C D E F sharp and
G. What's important here is that our root note
is G or the one. When we have our base
note or a root note in G, and we use the scale all
the way up to another G. We have the key of G major. We're going to be
discussing G major first and how to
be able to utilize it with Bluegrass in the
key of G in 44 time. And eventually,
we're going to be using what we're learning
with some backing tracks. The first step is knowing
what these notes are. We start first start with G, which is our root note, and I'm going to label it one, so it's the first
note in the scale. The second note in
the scale is an A. Followed by the third note
in the scale, which is a B, and so on, four,
five, six, seven, is F sharp, and then
G gets repeated, now I'm just back to a one, I'm not going to
label that eight. The first step in improvising is really
not improvising at all. I simply taking your instrument, whether you're
playing a Mandolin, a guitar, a fiddle, a banjo, whatever it might be, and simply playing the scale. And when we first play
the scale to one of these backing tracks that you will listen to a
little bit later, You're going to play
it straight up, so G A CD E F and G. Now, typically, in
some school districts, it's very common to go from G, A CD EF G and then
start with G again and go G F sharp EDC A G. Instead, it's For this example, it's going to be easier to hear melodic structures if we
don't play the G again. So it'll go like this, G A, D E G F sharp ED, CVA G. Now it would be a good time to
take out your instrument and play a simple G scale and playing it up
and down the scale. And every one of these
backing tracks that we have are laid out pretty simple. We have starting 50 beats per minute, so it's pretty slow, it's easy to catch on to, and you can move it up by ten beats per minute when
you feel comfortable to. And once you feel like
you're moving along, come back to the next
part where we're going to discuss bilinear playing.
4. Example G Scale You Can Follow on any Instrument - Bluegrass Improvisation: All right, we're going to
play just the G scale. And here's an example
before you go off to the back and tracks and start
practicing on your own. And this is at 80
beats per minute. Oh.
5. Bi-Linear Playing - Back and Forth - Bluegrass Improvisation: Now we're going to discuss
playing bilinearly. What that means. I'm going
to write this out for us. We have bilinear playing. What this means is a line, that's where bilinear comes
from is a straight line, and I'm going to think about
it going only one way. If I play my scale, going D M fast. I'm only playing it in one
direction all the way through. And if I was playing it by itself in its scale
up and set down, I'd go, D remi Faso la ti do
ti la so fami R D, and I'd be done, or I can do it as many times as I wanted to. But bilinear playing means that we're going to discuss
two different lines. So Two lines. And what this means
when we first start the improvisation process
that is not just the scale. We're going to go up the scale, and it doesn't matter what
chord is being played. It doesn't matter at
least at this point, where you are in the song, because there's no melodic
structure to the song. It's just a backing track, so you get to make up
anything that you want to. So you get to make the choice of where to change
directions in the scale. So you might go, da da da da da. So in this case, we change directions at B or the
third note in the scale, and then we went backwards, da, da, da, da, da, right? So you can do that as many
times as you want to. So in the case of
changing directions, we don't have to do it at
three or any place else, but we want to try to change directions as much as possible. Just for an exercise, to beg to get used to changing
directions in a scale. So we might play
something like this. Da da da da da da da da
da da da da da da da da. And that is just simply
changing the direction of which way you're
playing as many times as you possibly can
throughout the scale. You just want to
start out simple, change just one time and try to change two times
and three times, and so on and so forth. And when you're changing
directions, at this point, you're not changing
up your rhythm of your notes at this point, so they're all just
going to be long notes. Da da da da da da da. Right? When we're doing this, we're using a slow
backing track, maybe at 50 or 60
beats per minute. And then we're slowly working
our way up from that. So give that a shot, and then we're going to
work on what's next.
6. Example - Bi-Linear Playing: Here's an example of us
playing the G scale with our backing track at 80 beats per minute,
playing bi linearly. Remember that was
going up the scale, making a choice at any moment to change directions and
go back down the scale. So here's your example.
7. Changing Your Rhythmic Patterns While Playing Bi-Linearly: As we use our scale,
and we're playing it, we want to make sure that we're using the backing
tracks that's provided, and I'll make sure that I have an example of me playing
everything that we talk about. So in this case, as we're using slow
and fast notes, and we're not going to try to
think about them as, like, half notes or quarter notes
or anything like that, and we'll just think
about fast and slow notes because
it makes it easy to digest and makes it easy
to practice along with. So I might play something
like slow, fast fast, slow, fast fast, slow, slow slow, slow, fast
fast, fast fast, slow. And again, that's
only one example. Okay, once we have the
idea or we're able to play a scale with a few
different rhythmic things happening in the notes. So again, the example would
be slow, quick, quick, quick, quick, slow, slow, slow, quick, quick, quick, quick,
slow, slow, quick. Something like that.
The next step from that is playing b linearly
again. Two lines. So we're changing direction in our scale and using the idea of changing up the rhythm with our scale by linearly
playing them. So now it might be
something like this. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, slow, quick, quick,
qui, quick, slow, slow, qui, qui, qui,
quick, slow, slow, slow, slow, qui, quick,
quick, slow, slow. Again, that's just example. Try to make it up as many
different ways as you want to.
8. Example Mixing Up Rhythm Without Playing Bi-Linearly: Okay. This is our example of playing your G scale
with the backing tracks. My example is at 80
beats per minute, and as changing the rhythms. And at this point, we're not
playing linearly at all. We're just going up
and down the scale, changing the rhythms as we go, choosing a longer
or shorter rhythm.
9. Example Mixing Up Rhythms and Bi-Linear Playing With a Backing Track: In this example, I'm going to be playing the G scale while changing my rhythms
and my direction, playing bilinearly,
in my example. This example is at eight be per minute while playing one
of our backing tracks.
11. Discovering with Intervals: Intervals. So far, our rule that we've had is we've always had to
have a connecting note. If I wanted to go to the C note, I'd always have to
go from G to A to B to C. I couldn't
go from G to C to F sharp to A to G. That was
against the rules until now. Intervals can be fun to play, and when we're playing
some intervals, we're going to use at
least at this point, and we're going to break
our rules as we go. But we're going to use
notes the one the three, the five, and then
going back to the one. So This is going to look like an arpeggio or a one,
three, five arpeggio. D so me do. I would have to
use all of those. I could simply go do or 13. After I go to the 13, I'm simply going to either go up the scale or go down
the scale from that point. Or I can go up the scale, da da da, and then make the
skip to five if I want to. Da da da da da da da. And whenever I make these skips, it's always going to be
my jumping off point is either going to be
my one to the three. My jumping off
point was going to be the three to the
five or three to the one or five to
the one over here. At this point, we're just
going to leave the jumping off points away from A, C, E, and F sharp, and just think about
the G B D tones.
12. Arpeggio Intervals Example: Here's an example of me playing our G scale,
arpeggios, or intervals. Those on any instrument. This just happens to be a
mandolin, is going to be a Ge, a B and D note or any other
D G or B notes in there. I'm going to play the
G scale intervals G, B and D to a backing track
that's 80 beats per minute, so you can see how it goes. Now, I'm going to use the same intervals
that you just heard, but I'm going to
include the rest of the notes in the scale, including playing bear, breaking my notes up
into different rhythms, and playing it all along to the same backing track
at 80 beats per minute.
14. Example Arpeggios Scale Based: This is an example
of our G scale, scale based
arpeggios, and that's simply us going up to scale
using three notes at a time. We're starting with
G, then A then B. Then the first note that you play is also the last
note that you play. We started with a G,
we're ending on G, G A G. Then we simply go up to the
next note in the scale. Our first note was G, so
our second note is A. The next note is going to be A B A, and we're moving along, it's B C D E F sharp, D. Now we're just simply
up to scale the G. F sharp G, B down, the scale is very similar. It's just going down the scale. We're at g followed
by F sharp, the n E. Last note is the
same as the first, G then F sharp, E, D F sharp E D c E D B D C B A C B open A, excuse me, of any kind
on this instrument. C B A C B AG Now, I'm going to play it with a backing track at
80 beats per minute, and I'm going to
play it slow first, then mix up the rhythms and directions
playing bilinearly, my scale based arpeggios. Wards. Up to speed. Now I want to play
it up to speed, going back and
forth in my scale, playing bely and adding some different rhythms
along with it.
15. Play Everything You've Learned - Mixing it Up: Okay, so as a recap, and the next step
of what we want to do is mix up everything. What I mean by that is we've
played our full scale. That was the first thing
that we did. Da da. Then we played linearly in two different
directions in the scale, and we just changed
directions at will, that's playing bi Linearly. Number three, we
changed up our rhythm. After we changed up our rhythm, we started doing some
other stuff like using intervals in our
pageatic intervals. And number five. The last
thing that we did was we used scale based arpeggios, right? So Hops. Oh, my gosh. So after we're doing this, we're not going to spend
any time doing just one. Although you can
practice that at home just to get good at it. But the next step in the process is going back and forth
between the different parts. What I could do is I could
start out playing my scale, da da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And then I could
play by linearly. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And then I could
change up my rhythm. Da da da da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, right? And then I could change
up my arpeggios. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So now, I'm kind of doing a lot of different
things right now. And then I could do my
scale based arpeggios. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So, a mixture of all of
them might sound like this, and I'm going to point to which one I'm doing at the time. Da da da da da da
da da da da da da, da, da, da, da, da da da da da da da da da. In real time, switching up
the different things that we've learned and then makes
it sound more interesting. So we're not just
doing one at a time, but we're trying to mix them up in real time, making decisions. It doesn't have to
fall in this order. It just has to be a decision that you make that
you want to do like, Well, I'm going to
change up my rhythm, and then I'm going to do
scale based arpegios. And then I'm just going
to play a straight scale. And then I'm going
to mix up my rhythm. And then I'm going to do
intervals or interval arpeggios. Again, start real slow, and we're going
to practice this. As always, I'm going to give a couple examples on an
instrument so that you can see it in real time so that you're going to get a good
idea of what you're supposed to practice
with the backing trap.
16. Example Play Everything You've Learned - Mixing it Up: Okay. So now our next example
is F playing everything. So the scale by itself, using rhythmic differences
within the scale, going back and forth
within the scale, which is bilinear playing,
using our peggios, using our scale based
arpeggios and trying to mix it up as many
different ways as possible. Use your example.
17. Getting rid of 2 and 6 G Major Pentatonic: The next step for us after
we learned how to play the G scale and all of its
improvisational forms. We're going to learn
the next step, which is the G major
pentatonic scale. What that means is out of these
seven notes that we have, we're going to be left
with five of them. Penta meaning five, so we've got to get rid of
some of these notes. There's two different ways
to do it in a G major scale. The first one that we're
going to learn is going to eliminate the two
and the six tone. So we're left with
the one, the three, the five, the seven, and it's going to
go back to the one. What we're going to
want to be able to do is go back and
with everything that we've learned from
playing the scale all the way up and down,
playing b linearly. That means changing directions when you want to in the scale. Changing up our rhythms, playing notes that are fast and slow and super fast
and super slow. Playing our peggiotic forms, our Dm some dose, and our scale based arpeggios,
da da da, da da da. Well, they'll just sound
a little bit different with a couple of these
notes that are missing. When we're playing our
major pentatonic scale, we're just simply not
playing these notes.
18. Example Getting Rid of 2 and 6 G Major Pentatonic With a Backing Track: Here's an example of playing the G major pentatonic scale
with eliminating the two, see that it's no longer there or the six and see that
it's no longer there. We're going to play a g node, a B node, skipping the A, a C note, a D node. We skip the E so that
there's a F sharp there. The last note is a G. The example that we're
going to play is again to a 80 beat per minute
backing track in G.
19. Example Second G Major Pentatonic - Getting Rid of 4 and 7: Practicing our g major pentatonic scales to
the backing track. Specifically, the one that we eliminate the fourth tone
and the seventh tone, we still get one, two, three, four, five tones, pentatonic. What we're going to do is we're going to use the
same things we've already learned using our
regular G major scale. Mainly playing the
scale up and down, mixing up our rhythms, da da da, then playing b
linearly in the scale, and that's where we
go up the scale, choose a point and go the
opposite of the scale. The next thing we're going
to do is we're going to move the different directions in the scale and mix
up our rhythms. Now we have playing the scale, playing b linearly,
mixing up the rhythms. The next step for
us would be playing our pagiatic forms out of our
G major pentatonic scale. Or da da. I sound a little different
than what we did before because we're
skipping that fourth tone. When we're playing with
the back and tracks, we want to start at a really
slow beats per minute, possibly 50 beats per minute
or 60 beats per minute, and work your way up from there.
20. Example Second G Major Pentatonic - Eliminating 4 and 7 With a Backing Track: Here's an example of the major pentatonic scale using the one, two, three, five, six, one, eliminating the
four on the seven. I'm going to play it
with the backing tracks at 80 beats per minute and work my way around the different things
that we've learned so far, including playing the
scale back and forth. They are pagiatic forms, playing different rhythms,
bilinear playing, and so on. Here we go.
21. New G Minor Pentatonic Scale: Now for the G minor
pentatonic scale. These backing tracks that we
have for you are designed with the chords not to have the three present in
the chord structure. So it allows us to play either the G minor
pentatonic scale over the song or the backing
track to make it sound blue Z or the major scale to
make it sound more regular like a melodic G major scale or a G major pentatonic
scale, one of the two, right? In this case, we still have to make it a
pentatonic scale. And what we're going
to do is we're going to eliminate the two tone for
a minor pentatonic scale. And this is pretty typical
to have one of them. Although there's
Hungarian minor, all sorts of different types of minor and jazz
versions of scales. But in this case, the standard G minor pentatonic scale is
what we're going for. So we're going to
get rid of the two, and we're going to
get rid of the six. To make it minor, we're
going to flatten the B note, one scaled gary,
which just means one half step in the
case of a mandolin. It's one fret down, and that'll turn into a
B flat instead of a B. The same thing that's
going to happen with the seven tone, the seven tone is F sharp, There's the rest of the sharp. We're just going to
make it instead of sharp is just going
to be a natural F. Every node has its own
sharp natural and flat. If it was sharp, we're just moving it
down one to a natural, and we don't necessarily have to mark all of
these notes with all these little
funky B natural signs because when they're
by themselves, they're always assumed
to be natural.
22. G Minor Pentatonic Scale Example: Here's our example of our G minor pentatonic scale for starting out with
a G and a B flat, a C D F natural and a G. I'll be showing you an
example that has me playing along with an 80 beats
per minute backing track.
23. 60 BPM Practice Everything You've Learned and Use for Your Class Project Bluegrass Backing Track Ke: In this practice session, you'll be playing what
you've learned in this course at 60
beats per minute. M D Do D D D D D D
24. 80 BPM Practice Everything You've Learned and Use for Your Class Project Bluegrass Backing Track Ke: In this practice session, you'll be playing what
you've learned in this course at 80
beats per minute.
25. 100 BPM Practice Everything You've Learned and Use for Your Class Project Bluegrass Backing Track Ke: In this practice session, you'll be playing what you've learned in this course at 100
beats per minute. Oh. D Ohh. H Oh, Oh a
26. 120 BPM Practice Everything You've Learned and Use for Your Class Project Bluegrass Backing Track Ke: In this practice session, you'd be playing what
you've learned in this course at 120
beats per minute.
27. 140 BPM Practice Everything You've Learned and Use for Your Class Project Bluegrass Backing Track : In this practice session, you'd be playing what you've
learned in this course at 140 beats per minute.
Lesson Pros, Learn from the Pros
