Double Notes 6ths Lesson

Playing Double-note 6ths - 0

In this vid 6ths are used over a Blues progression. Namely the chords of G7, C add13 and D add13. 6ths are basically playing two notes at once. A note, and it's corresponding note which lies, yup you've guess it a sixth away from it - this is called 'an Interval'..

Intervals are basically just a way of measuring the distance between notes in a scale. If you need further help with theory like this, well check out our resident GMC theory master, one Mr. Andrew Cockburn - good man Andrew great stuff! Learning theory can and will cut your learning time on the instrument by vast amounts!

So, this little lesson is all about playing 6ths over a progression like this. But they can be used in many styles of music not just Blues.

We'll also be looking at changing the standard 1, 4, 5 Blues chords into something more Bluesy and even Jazzy.

Here's the progression:

G7 / / / : G7 / / / : C13 / / / : C13 / / / :
G7 / / / : G7 / / / : D13 / / / : C13 / / / :
G7 / / / : D13 / / /:

These as you may know are the basic one, four, five chords required to play a basic Blues. It means you take the 1st, 4th and 5th notes from a scale, and build a chord on them.

The scale of C reads:

C D EF G A BC
1 2 34 5 6 78

So if we take the 1st, 4th and 5th from this scale we get the notes we need to play our Blues in C, namely C, F and G.

The 1 chord is a C major chord and can be made sound more Bluesy by playing it as a Dominant 7th chord. So we get C7.

This sound much Bluesier than just a straight major chord. And we've colored the whole progression even more by making the 4 + 5 chords add13s. We'll be covering all of these chords changes later as we cover more ground. For now just feel free to play the chords as shown and don't worry about 13s or any other chord changes we may use.

As mentioned in the diagram below, there are no root notes in either of the 13 chords (full name * add 13) used. This is ok to do as the bass and keys are playing the root notes and holding down the chords. This leads to a more 'spacey' mix by not adding the bass notes on the guitar for these chords.