Hi and welcome to the lessonswithtroy.com, I’m Troy. In this lesson, I want to teach you a little bit about playing ear with the Dobro, how to understand chords, and chord tones and keys. If you’re in a jam session or writing a tune and you want to play chords in that particular key or your playing a chord and you wonder what notes you could play to give you a sound, like bluesy sound or a bluegrass sound or whatever kind of sound you want. The kinds of note choices you can play over a particular chord.
So let’s just get started, and hopefully, by the end of this you’ll be able to go to jam sessions and hear chords a little bit better and understand what you can play over these chords. The first that I want to alter is this major seventh here [Demonstration].
Okay. The majority of things you’re probably playing on Dobro is like country blues or bluegrass kind of stuff. Now, I'm not saying that F sharp, you can never use that, but I particularly like F natural over a G chord, if you’re in more of a country blues kind of format. What that gives, if you take that F-sharp on your fourth fret [Demonstration] and you flat it to your third fret to where you have an F natural over a G major chord. That’s why it’s called the dominant seven. That’s the flatted seven. That’s the blue sound that you’re looking for [Demonstration]. A little sound, so I'm taking up that major seventh and flatting it to a down seven [Demonstration].
All I did there is I'm just sliding down, keeping with the key, sliding down from a dominant seventh to my E, the sixth of my chord. So both those were [Demonstration]. And then pulling off to an open D which is the fifth of my chord [Demonstration]. A real common thing to do too is not just play F by itself, but if you put your bar flat f lat, then you can grab this D on your second string. Remember the D is the fifth of our G major chord. The fifth stocked on top of that seventh has a great blues, double stuff blues. So I’m going to play it with my thumb and my middle finger, so it sounds like this [Demonstration].
All I'm doing there is I'm just sliding that down. Now, that’s if you think of every note that I am playing here, I’m actually sliding that D down to a C sharp. It gets it out of our keys just a little bit. Okay, just more flat kind of sound, I’ll get into that more once I start talking about altering fifth. But yeah, play that F natural and just remember, like I said, find that all over your Dobro. On the sixth fret, on the second string, on the third string; it’s on your tenth fret [Demonstration]. On your fourth string that’s on your third fret, because remember, it was on your third fret on your first string. The fourth string is the same note [Demonstration]. On your fifth string, it’s going to be on your sixth fret [Demonstration]. And on your sixth string, it’s going to be way up here on your 10th fret [Demonstration].
So get use to finding wherever the note and you know the name of it and you know how it works over chord, find that note over all your strings and how you can move it around [Demonstration]. So dominant seventh, we’ll get bluesy sound. Lets find another one.
Another one that gives you a real nice bluesy sound is taking your major third [Demonstration] and flatting it through a minor third. So taking B flat, you’re playing G major chord. We’re going to start and take B natural [Demonstration], playing the G major chord and make it B flat [Demonstration] and just move it down in that step. Now what you can do, it sounds real nice, just moving this minor third, this B flat up to your major third [Demonstration].
Okay, so I just went down to my dominant seventh back. So yeah, so just B flat, there’s a real nice bluesy sound [Demonstration]. So that’s to get in your head, that sound of either minor third going to major third, back to your [Demonstration] or maybe just taking it and [Demonstration] or sliding from your ninth through your second, you’re a, you’ll find the G major chord, two minor third. Or also, another good one is taking your major third, going to minor third, going to ninth or second and then ending on the root [Demonstration].
Now, you can come up with all the—once you start thinking of these notes a intervals of the chord and how to manipulate those to give you a bluesy sound or real major sound [Demonstration]. Staying on the key, then you can really start hearing your solos specially, hearing how you can manipulate notes and get the sound that you want.
Okay let’s try some of the others.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services