The SECRET SCALE used by Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Slash & John Squire

who was the greatest British rock guitarist of the 1960s for my money there is no competition whatsoever it was Eric Clapton with cream what about the 1970s again it's just my opinion but for me it's this man Jimmy pagee of Leed Zeppelin in the 1980s I would say Slash of Guns and Roses did you know he is actually from stoon Trent and didn't even get American citizenship until 19 1996 and despite being half American half British he actually considers himself black British so I'm going to do the same in the 1990s the greatest British guitarist

was in my opinion John Squire in those decades those four guitarists in my opinion stood Head and Shoulders Above the Rest in the British rock and roll guitar scene and did you know they all have one remarkable thing in common with each other an absolute mastery of a specific lead guitar solo scale which I have still to this day never found properly defined or explained in any book video or article in my entire life so today I want to share with you something that it's taken me literally decades to learn I want to share with

you what I believe that solo scale shape is and the rules that govern its use now I will just be clear from the start this has only come from my personal studies of these four guitarists and of course it probably is covered properly in some book somewhere but whatever that book may have been as a young guitarist I couldn't find it and any books I did read on the subject tended to be totally impenetrable and I couldn't understand them anyway but this is my explanation of how those guitarists were able to form such incredible lead

guitar lines solos and riffs the secret scale used by the greatest lead guitar masters of four Decades of rock and roll to explain the secret guitar scale of the British guitar Legends properly we have to start at the beginning we need to First just cover the basics so that the more complicated stuff later makes sense so this is the pentatonic box it's one of the easiest and simplest solo scales for beginning guitarists to learn [Music] and that particular one I just played you works in the key of C also known as a minor so if

that scale works in the key of C we have seven chords that we can play under it you need two guitarists you need one to just play some chords say c f a minor and g a pretty simple little sequence and while the first guitarist is strumming those chords the second one can just make something up using literally any one of those notes from that pentatonic box and as long as the chords don't deviate from those seven you literally can't go out of tune and I'll demo that for you now with a very simple chord

sequence just taken from those seven chords and I'll noodle something over the top using that basic pentatonic scale [Music] so that's the absolute Bottom Rung of the ladder the simplest form of guitar solo you can take things up a step by simply filling in five more notes on that basic scale scale so instead of [Music] this we're going to add in five new ones there's a new one there's a new one there's a new one another new one and there's the last new one and I'll demo that natural minor shape for you now using exactly

the same chords [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and for many people that's as far as they ever go when it comes to improvisation however the reality is that playing the major scale or the natural minor scale over those same seven chords will all always pretty much convey the same mood and I remember I'd only been playing for a few years as a teenager before I was already pretty fluent in League guitar I remember working on solos working on improv and thinking is this really it I was actually 18 years old and on tour with

a band when I discovered there was a whole language on the guitar fretboard into which I had barely yet even dipped my toes I was gigging I think somewhere in the Midlands and during the band's set an older bloke got up and asked if he could sit in for a song our bass player was absolutely rubbish so I took over on bass I gave this bloke my guitar and let him take over on the mic so he could sing for one tune now at 18 years old I was very very good the son of two

music teachers I had my grade eight guitar and already 3 years of constant live experience under my belt I'd been teaching since I was 15 I I was a bit of a cocky little thing but the truth was I rarely met anyone who could challenge me in any way musically I was pretty smug and self assured and before the bloke started playing in all honesty I was expecting crap he asked me if I knew the 12 Bar Blues in a which is a very simple three chord sequence I of course said yes but then he

went one 2 3 4 and launched into my favorite song then and now Crossroads by but he didn't play Clapton solos he just wailed on lead guitar making his own stuff up on the spot but he was using scales and notes and applying rules that I realized all of a sudden that I didn't bloody know frankly he absolutely blew me off the stage but weirdly I actually didn't mind at all because of the size of the discovery I had just made I realized with excitement that here at last was something actually genuinely knew I had

to learn this musical language whatever the hell it was and I only had one word available to me as a clue as I set out to solve this mystery Blues I knew all the 12 notes and I knew their names I knew how they functioned in the major scale what I didn't know was how on Earth musicians like Eric Clapton Jimmy Page slash and John Squire were stringing those 12 notes together to produce such an incredible sound there was some secret key some formula governing their note choices a scale and I needed to figure out

what it was but the internet then was in its absolute infancy and books were no help at all mostly filled with bewildering jargon designed to impress people who already knew how to play the blues I was able to figure out scraps from books and articles guitar teachers could tell me disjointed pieces of the puzzle but that was it there was no clearly articulated explanation anywhere defining this scale and explaining how it worked so round about the age of 19 I realized I was going to have to figure this out for myself and what followed was

over 20 years of obsessively listening to the Blues playing the blues and analyzing it in reality it actually took me about 10 years to really codify what I believe to be the actual true blue scale and not the silly simplistic trap that they put in the grade books which you can see on screen right now but the one that the British guitar Legends actually used on their greatest recordings and also the rules by which it works so today I'm going to attempt to explain it to you and I want to do it in a way

that 18-year-old me could have understood if he was watching this video for the first time I'm going to do my absolute best to keep the language simple and accessible and to avoid jargon and Technical ter terms at every turn this video is not for people who already understand all the theory it's for the ones who don't most traditional Blues just follows a very simple chord sequence called the 12 Bar Blues and that chord sequence literally only uses three chords I'll demo that for you now in a [Music] [Laughter] [Music] though other forms of Blues develop

this and adapt it this is the fundamental Skeleton on which all Blues pretty much is based so how should you play your lead guitar over for these chords there are actually five ways you can do it level one the major scale you could just do it as if it's a major key using the basic major scale [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's okay but really it's just more of the same it sounds very nice and it's not very bluesy at all level two playing the minor scale over major chords many people think this is how

you do it you have the Rhythm guitarist playing a major while the league guitarist solos in a minor so let's have a listen I'll play that exact same 12 Bar blue sequence in a again and this time I'll improvise something using the a minor key [Music] [Laughter] it's not bad in places it's a little more bluesy but we still haven't really cracked the code yet so now at last we start drawing closer to the bullseye level three is the hybrid scale having established you can't just use the major scale and you can't just use the

minor scale there's nothing left what do we use then well this is where we finally home in on the real answer the true blue scale so we're going to start off with a bog standard major scale this is a major and now we have to make three changes three adaptations to that scale the first one is this 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 that's note seven we need to move that down one fret so every time we play the scale now we play the zero not the one so it'll sound like this second change

now we have to add a note and it's this one the dreaded trone so here's the work in progress scale with one change note and one added note [Music] and lastly the third and final change we have to make is we have to add one more note and it's this that's called a minor third the third note of a major or a minor scale is actually the one that really makes it major or minor and that's the interesting thing about Blues it contains both notes it contains the minor third and the major third so let's

play that scale now with the two added notes and the one change [Music] note starting to sound very bluesy [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and so that's it isn't it we are at last on the right Trail but we're not finished yet because there is another Rule and it's one of the most fundamental to True Blues and one that many guitarists and guitar our teachers don't know and it's this level four the Adaptive hybrid scale if you remember as we've already seen in basic soloing you just find your solo scale shape and you just stay

in it for the whole song no matter what the chords are doing as long as the song doesn't change key or the chords don't do anything too far outside the key you can just stay in that position if you want to for the whole song well here is the last little twist the last secret rule that most people don't know in the 12 Bar Blues we've got those three chords A D and E to solo using the true blue scale you have to change key every single time the chord changes so you can't just stay

in that one position for the whole song If the chord changes you've got to effectively move to to match the chord it's almost like if you picture bar chords you can figure out where you should be playing your solo scale from so when the chord A is playing you should be here on Fret five when the chord D is playing you should be here on Fret 10 and when e is playing here on Fret 12 or zero both of those are e so you can play from both positions the hybrid blue scale should not just

sit in one place for the whole song it has to jump around to follow the chords as if every chord was a key change and that took me bloody years to figure out years and years and years and now for some reason I'm giving that information away to you so now let me demo that for you over the 12 Bar Blues in a every time the chord changes I'm going to physically move up up and down the neck just to represent where the chord changes occur and so where the key changes occur in the solo

scale [Music] [Applause] [Music] and so now we move on to the final level total Mastery you don't really often see the Great British League guitar Masters doing what I just did do you they don't tend to physically shift every single time there's a chord change and that's because once you master this once you really absorb it and know the fretboard back to front you actually don't need to physically move up and down the neck like I just did and that's because most of those notes up the neck are actually available in the same position you've

just got to know the notes really really well you've got to pretty much know exactly what note is on every single string in every position what I showed you on step four should actually only really be a stepping stone to step five you shouldn't really be soloing here then here then here almost all of those those notes are available here you don't actually have to keep moving but you do have to know the fretboard inside and out so now I'm going to solo over the 12 Bar Blues one more time but this time I'm going

to stay around fret five but I am also going to change scale as the chord changes and this is the secret scale this is what the Masters did [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and this is what Eric Clapton Jimmy Page slash and John Squire all having common this level of Mastery over both the true blue scale and over their guitar fretboards and what happens once a guitarist reaches that point is all of a sudden they do actually start leaping all over the neck again but not because they have to to get into the right scale

shape but simply because they can because they want the full range of notes available when you're learning level four you want to train yourself to actually move with the scale so you learn the sound you get a sense for What notes should should come next what they should sound like when you're training yourself in level five you should then train yourself once more to not move around the neck but to use all those notes in the same position but then when you've mastered level five as those four guitarists I've mentioned did you then have the

whole neck available to you once again and you can leap all over the place not because you have to to shift key but because you want to to have access to those higher notes Eric clap was in my opinion the greatest of the four guitarists we've looked at today and if you listen to stepping out with the Blues Breakers or Crossroads by Cream you can actually hear him moving between every single scale shape suggested in this ladder he actually opens one of the solos to Crossroads in the major scale then he moves into the minor

scale then he moves into the hybrid scale everywhere up and down the neck and to me Eric Clapton's playing in the 60s represents the absolute limit of what is attainable using this Theory and this scale and so that's it if you want to master this be warned it is a marathon not a Sprint find yourself a 12 Bar Blues in a backing track you like sit and noodle for hours and as you do that you'll start to gradually develop what's called a lick Library a memorized bunch of solar riffs that you can use in any

song you want Eric Clapton had loads of these solo stock phrases and and the more you do it you'll gradually develop the ability to get the blistering music you're hearing up here out on the guitar very best of luck to all the budding guitar Legends out there and as always I'll see you next time