Full transcript of “This Simple Trick Connects Chords to Solos!”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 If your solos live up here in the box patterns, but your chords live down here in A and D, you're doing twice the work for half the results, guys. Hey, I'm Freds. What I want to do today is I want to show you how those three chord shapes, the E, the A, and the D shape, can become your built-in solo navigation system. We've got one root note. We've got a simple two string pattern. And your lead playing will finally connect to the chords that you're actually playing. Now, the thing is, you can strum these all day, but turning them into solos can feel like guesswork. So, what we have to do is find the root note in each of these shapes. The reason we
0:45 want to find the root note for each of these shapes is because the root note is going to be our launch pad. It's where we launch a string pair pattern for the major pentatonic. But not just that, we're going to extend that pattern and we're going to get some other juicy notes in there as well. So, because this is an E shape, we can see that we have an open E here. That's the root note of the chord. We have another root note here. That's another root note of the chord. But what you might not realize is there is a root note hiding inside of this shape here. The fingers that you actually have on the chord. And it goes like this. It goes fifth root third. That's what you have to remember there guys. I call it 5 R3. And if you've seen any other videos where I
1:32 talk about five R3, this is why you need to understand it. Now the thing about the E shape in the open position, it's great for showing you the E pattern starting here. But what if you want it further up the neck? We can utilize this E shape here in any position on the guitar neck. And this is the beauty of this because it moves it all around the neck. So let's take this shape here for instance. And we're going to look at that. And we just got to remember that we've got the fifth, the root, and the third there, guys. Right. So I showed you three shapes. I showed you the E shape, the A shape, and the D shape. Let me put my fingers on an A shape here. We've got these three fingers on here. I know some of you guys will see I play it with one finger, but for showing you this, I need to do it on three fingers here. And if I
2:19 look at these three fingers, I've got the fifth, the root, and the third. So that middle note in that cluster of three is going to be the root note, just like it was with the E shape. Look, there's a cluster of three fingers. That middle finger there is the root note. The next shape we need to look at is the D shape. And if we look at the D shape yet again, it's a three-finger cluster. We've got the fifth, got the root, and the third again. And the middle note of that cluster is the root yet again. So, it's really interesting that you can see here that the five R3 of the E shape is those three fingers. We get the five R3 again when we put the A shape on. And we get the five R3 when we put the D shape on. And with a D chord, we get the open
3:06 D string again, which means we could start here. If we're in the open position, then that's a viable starting point to play this two string pentatonic pattern I'm going to show you. Let's go back to this E shape here. And we know that we can use this, like I said, in the open position. And if we want to use it in the open position, what we're going to do is we're going to build a leg and a rectangle pattern. And that's what I call them because we can extend this as well. With this, we're going to go up a whole step here and then draw a rectangle. Now, if I play that all the way to the root over here, which happens to live inside our E chord.
3:52 Does that sound familiar? 0 2 4 2 4 2. So that utilizes the open strings there. But what happens if I move that shape up somewhere like this? This is a G. Now I can't play that now because I've lost my open string that is related to the chord. So what I have to do now is I have to shift it over to the root that is in the middle of the three finger cluster of that shape. So if I take that root there, I could play the step there. Now that's what most people show you. But here's the thing that I'm going to
4:37 do is I'm going to extend it up to the octave. Which means what I do is I put another leg on the rectangle, which takes me. And you can see I'm only using one string pair there. I'm on the D and the G string. Let's go back to the original position. And I can show you this down here because by moving up there, you might thinking, "Oh, I'm a little bit lost here, Ricky." But let me just take you back here into this E shape here. So we go and that takes me all the way up to the G string at the ninth fret. Guys, we're covering some territory with this. So what I do is from that root in that five R3, I go up a whole step. Then I think
5:25 of it as drawing a rectangle with my fingers there like that. But when I want the octave, I add a minor third, which is a step and a half step above, and I slide into that. And that gives me the full pattern. Now, that's really cool because what I've done is I've landed back on my root note, which means I can play exactly the same pattern again. It's going to be a bit tricky on the G to the B string because I have to make that compensation So I get the same scale idea twice there, but with only one pattern needing to be memorized. So that's the E shape
6:11 taken care of. Let's move over to the next shape. This A shape just here. And we can see five R3. That's the thing that helps you. This is your north star here. So this is going to be the root note. We're going to take that same idea and this is going to help us to connect the E and the A shape together. So look, this is moving up from the G to the B string. And this is the same thing that I did before, but now you can see which shape it comes from. It comes from the A shape here. So I go up a step. If I just play the rectangle, you can hear it sounds wrong. That's because we need to compensate by going up one fret between the G to the B string to maintain the fourth between
6:57 those two strings. And it gives us this little romboid pattern. Can be tricky because it feels like your legs and your fingers are crossing over. I've got my root note. Second, major third. There's my fifth. There's my sixth. And then I'm going to slide up a minor third. Yes. So a step and a half step. And that puts me back on my root note again. And I know that's the fact because I can play my D shape here. Now, because I've played my D shape, this brings in the last of these shapes. We're going to play it in the open position down here just so that you can tally it with the shape where you know it. But we can move this shape up. And
7:44 just to show you what I mean about moving the shape up, if I take this D chord here, I'm only playing the GB and E strings. So if I shift that up, then I move it up a step, that's going to give me an E. If I move it up a half step, it's going to give me an F. If I move it up a half step again, that's going to give me an F sharp or a G flat. If I move it up to the ninth fret, that's going to give me an A like I played before. So this is a completely movable idea, guys. The shape is the north star for the pattern. So let's take that there. Right now I know by looking at my fingers here. I've got three fingers on yet again. And those are my five R3. So if I take the root, move up a whole step, play the rectangle because I'm back on a perfect fourth string pair.
8:34 Now I need to finish this pattern off. So I've got the root, second, third, fourth, fifth, and there is my octave again. So what have we got so far? We've got three five R3 shapes, which are the E, the A, and the D shapes. And then we have our root notes, which come from the five R3 that we discover in those shapes. And then what we have is our string pair pentatonics. And let's make sure that you absolutely get this. These are not the limited pattern where we have three notes then two notes. We extend it because we want to get the full range of the octave in there. So we get a leg rectangle and then a longer leg which is a minor third.
9:19 We're always going to have that pattern. Now the cool thing is we can add some notes in here to make this a bit more fancy. I'm in the E shape here. Start on the root note. move up that whole step that I need to for the leg of the shape. And if I fill in here with this note here, I get the flat third, which is the note that changes the major pentatonic into a major blues scale. So you can hear that that note adds some personality to the scale. Now what if we could add another note? That would be pretty cool as well. And this is where the extended
10:06 rectangle pattern comes into play. We take the leg, put the rectangle on, and we know this is an octave. Now the thing to know here guys is that if this is the octave then we get a major 7 one fret below and we get a flat seven two frets below it. So if we have this as chord one or chord four in the key those would be major 7th chords if we wanted to express them as major 7s. So, let's look. There's the major 7. And that gives me some extra color because the seventh is a color note just like the third is. There's one more
10:52 chord in the key that is major, but that has a different kind of seventh. That's chord five. This gives us the bluesy sound. So, to get the bluesy sound, this is a really cool shortcut, guys. We've got this E here. Now, I could put that on here. And you can see that this becomes an E7. We do the same thing when we want to turn this E shape into an E7. What we do is we take that third finger off, which basically takes the root note down a whole step. So, we do the same thing with the scale. And there we get the flat 7. And that means we get that bluesy sound
11:38 within the framework of that major pentatonic. Let's try that in the A shape. We're going to get the root. We move up a step. That's where that flat third is. Compensate. And then I'm going to go up that minor third there. If I want it to be a major seventh sound, I just drop down one fret. If I want it to be the dominant seventh sound, I drop down two frets. So you can hear that that's how it works in that A shape. Let's look at this D. Let's look at it as being either chord one or chord four. So we get a step. Here's the rectangle. And then here's the minor third.
12:25 Let's do it as a major 7th. Let's even play a major 7 down here. Now, you can see we're matching the scale with the chord, but it's a different way of doing it. We're using string pairs. You can hear that that works with that, but it gives us this range on the neck that we don't have in pentatonic box patterns. So, let's look at this as being a seventh chord like this. You can see here if I take the D chord, take that root note, you can see it lowers down two frets or one whole step to get to that D7 there. Let's do the same
13:11 thing here. Same landmark, same pattern, but we've got these extra notes that we can add for more attitude and personality. Now, the cool thing about this is this is from a video that I did a while ago where we can link those shapes up together. If we have an E here, and that's using the E shape, and like I showed you, we could have a D shape here, but if I move it up here, I can get a D-shaped. You can even borrow this root note here to get that there. Then what I could do is I can link those two up.
13:59 So, I just join two up there. Now, as you do this, you'll start to see that it links to your box patterns anyhow. And then you can just drop into them and play your favorite licks. But this fits in all those three shapes and it moves up here. But you're not just restricted to where we think those shapes live. We can move this idea like I showed you earlier on. If I've got an E shaped here. So, I've got that going on there. And I can play that into this seventh sound.
14:44 Now, the cool thing is is that's my E shape. I know that my D shape's going to be here and my A shape's going to be here. So, I can use those three shapes to link all the way up the neck. So, by now you should know that your E, A, and D shapes aren't just rhythm chords. They're launchpads or north stars for your major and blues lines using those string pairs. If you want to see the full version of this idea and how the string pairs repeat and how it links into the circle of fourths, which is really good, and how to use it to play literally everywhere on the neck, then that's exactly what I break down in this next lesson. It's on the screen now. Click that and I'll show you how far this little idea can take
