Fred Sokolow Teaches How to Play Little Sister

Fred Sokolow Teaches How to Play Little Sister That’s your E blue scale. Let me play it again slowly. [Demonstration] That’s the famous pentatonic which just means five notes blue scale but there are other notes that you want to play too in the key of E. Let’s expand it to this. [Demonstration] One more time [Demonstration] Now why are we talking about the scale all of a sudden? These are notes that will be real little handy for you to stick in between the vocals on matchbox friends since we are not done with matchbox but I won’t show it. You can stick those in there as filler notes for little fills that supply like this. [Demonstration] So they are just kind of filler notes that you are improvising but there’s a lot more to a scale than that. The real reason for learning a scale is you can use it too. It will help you play melodies. It will help you improvise and it will also help you actually play tunes. For instance, you can play. [Demonstration] Now I am doing a few little slides of things. Sometimes instead of playing the 2nd string, I slide up to that note on the 3rd string. [Demonstration] And on this note, I might do this. [Demonstration] This is the minor third in the E chord. That’s what makes it a minor instead of a major chord. And then the blues, you fill around with the minor 3rd a lot. You go back and forth between the two. You get that slide in half counts like that way. [Demonstration] Another thing you can do with the blue scale, you can bend note. For instance, this note here you can bend that 1st string up. You can bend this one up. This is in the 2nd string and you can bend the 3rd string at the 2nd fret. Now you can get stuff like-- [Demonstration] So that’s really what the scale is for is to go ahead and play the tune. Also, this leak that we used as a turn around beat make and frequently you will just take the middle two strings, the 3rd and 2nd string and just slide them up. That’s part of your scale. [Demonstration] Like that and you could bend four slide because those are all good effects that you can get with the blue scale. So let’s see, we’ve done this hammer onto the 3rd string. We’ve done it that made some interesting uses of the turn around leak and done just the scale with a bent strip of choking, bending strings idea. I think what we need to do is put it all together in the tune. There is a song called Little Sister that was an Elvis hit. Hank Garland was the guitar player on that and of course it was resurrected more recently by Dwight Yoakam. Let’s take a look at Little Sister. [Demonstration] Just that one little segment of that tune there as a whole bunch of the stuff in it that we have been talking about, let’s looked at that leak. You got these blues notes right over at the blue scale then here is an interesting leak. You got that bend that I told you it happens in the E blue scale. It goes up, comes down and then pulls off. So you really get three or four notes there for the price you want, yeah like that so you got [Demo]. Then you hit the 4th string. Now this could be done with the flat pick or finger picks. It doesn’t really matter but the left hand is where some interesting stuffs are going on. So that’s a leak that gets repeated then I’m just sort of brushing down on this E7th. Then it goes to A7th to this A7th. Now you’ve got this familiar leak that we use this to turn around. You just slide up to it and then look how it comes down and slide down on the 3rd string. While you open 4th string, 4th string opens so now you are on the B7th and you just strum on the B7th and then another real standard blues move that I didn’t mentioned yet is you lift the B7th up a fret and then come back down again. It happens in the Susie Q. It happens on a bunch of tunes as well as all blues tune. And then back to here to E and the leak comes in again. So when you do it again slowly. [Demonstration] Okay, let’s hang on there for just a minute and we will talk about some other E blues with some Lightnin’ Hopkins moves.