Frank Gambale and pentatonic shapes and modes

You could do the same in any of the diatonic keys but I’m not sure what help it would be with modal playing. I think I might have that book somewhere, I’ll see if I can find it 🙂 If not, can you give me some more detail.

Hi Lee

Thanks for your quick response to the Frank Gambale point, you can find a free pdf of the book I’m talking about. I tried to unload a picture but did not have permission. So I will write out what he said on page 20 of the book.

Scale: G dorian=2nd more of Fmaj= 12b3456b7 for G=GABbCDEF. Pentatonic Dm=DFGAC. His formula goes

Scale Dorian=pentatonic/blues up a fifth, arpeggio maj7 up/min 3rd. Triad maj down whole step. As I said above the book is called the Frank Gambale technique book one I bought it years ago in OZ, but it’s free on the internet as a pdf, I use it mainly in an Ionian context using eminor petatonic.

Ok, I found the book 🙂
I’ll be honest, this stuff is not something I’ve spent much time messing around with. It either takes a lot of work to sound good or is, in my opinion, only suited to certain styles of music.

There’s also a difference between playing fast and more slow or melodic, you get away with a lot more when you pay fast because you aren’t hanging on the “bad” notes for too long. This is explained in my latest series of articles Guitar soloing the problem with scales

Ok, what Frank is talking about? In his opinion, the Dorian scale works great over any min7 chord, there are no bad notes. I guess that’s subjective but who am I to argue with one of the greatest! 🙂

What he’s talking about is D Dorian works great over a Dmin7 for example. There are no bad notes – keep that in mind and let’s break down the scale.

D Dorian’s relative major is C major, so as far as the notes are concerned, they are the same thing.

When we harmonise the C major scale we get

C major
D minor
E Minor
F major
G major
A minor
B diminished

So according to Frank, we can play any of the triads for those chords over a Dmin7. Each note belongs to C major / D Dorian, so they all work.

We could extend the chords and play around with the notes. In one of his examples he uses an Fmaj7 arpeggio over Dmin7. They’re very similar. Dmin7 = D F A C. Fmaj7 = F A C E. He drops the root and adds the E. Three of the notes remain in common to both chords so we can see why it works.

What about pentatonics? If we relate pentatonic scales to each of the chords in C major (apart from the diminished) we get:

C major Pentatonic
D minor Pentatonic
E Minor Pentatonic
F major Pentatonic
G major Pentatonic
A minor Pentatonic

Again, break down the notes and we’ll see that all of them contain only notes belonging to C major scale. He says the D, E and A minor pentatonics all sound good, and while we’re at it, if we’re using minor pentatonics we could also throw in the b5 from the blues scale.

So apart from the b5’s, all of these chords and pentatonic scales only using notes that belong to C major / D Dorian.

Yep, I suppose Frank is a fusion based player, I just thought it was an interesting way to view the fretboard as your book opened up another way to view it for me.  Thanks for replying to my question I really appreciate it, and by the way I left a 5 star comment on Amazon about it.

Darren

Frank Gambale is an amazing guitarist so he makes anything sound good 🙂

Even if you find his ideas difficult to use, they’re all worth learning and experimenting with. They open up the fretboard to new ideas and that’s never a bad thing. After reading some of that, I might have a play around with some of it myself when I get time. I bought the book many years ago but never really went through it, which is the case with a lot of stuff I buy!

Thanks for the review, I appreciate it.