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I’m going to share a quick theory tip with you now, and that is to explain about relative keys. Keys that are relative to one another contain the same notes. So if I play the notes from the C major scale, those notes are C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. No sharps or flats.
C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. But if I play the A minor scale, which is the relative key to C major, the notes are A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Can you see how they’re the same notes, just played in a different order? It’s really weird. They sound totally different to me. It’s the same notes.
The only difference is where we started playing them. So a C major, sounds bright, optimistic, happy. A minor, has a different feel, yeah, it’s got a minor tonality, feels a bit more sad, a bit more melancholy, even though the notes are exactly the same.
Now every key has a relative minor or major to it. So if the key is G major, the relative minor is E minor. We just looked at C major, the relative minor is A minor.
It’s really easy to find, you just go down three frets. So if you want to know what the relative minor key is to A, yeah, then we just go down three, one, two, three, to F sharp. So A major has the same notes in it as F sharp minor.
Same notes, just played in a different order. Now why does this matter? Okay, it really, really matters because from a lead guitar point of view, this is the best news ever because it means you just need to know one scale, one pattern you can play over any key. This is amazing, like unbelievably brilliant news.
You can just use a minor pentatonic scale pattern. So if I play it in A here, you can just use that one minor pentatonic scale pattern and you can play lead guitar over any song in any key. Like this is the best breakthrough in the history of brilliant guitar breakthroughs.
You know, it’s going to save you hundreds and hundreds of hours of practice, loads of stress. You don’t need to learn loads of different, you know, keys and scales, you just learn one scale pattern. You can play lead guitar over any song.
All you need to do is move that pattern around. Now we’re not going to go into that in lots of detail here. This isn’t a, you know, a lead guitar deep dive.
This is just a little nugget of theory that I wanted to share with you. So you know that, okay, every key has a relative key. You find that by just going down three frets from major to minor.
If it’s a minor key, then you have to go the opposite way. If you’re trying to work out what the relative major is to a minor key, then you have to go up three frets instead of down three frets. If you just remember that three fret rule and you know how to play the minor pentatonic scale, which is the easiest scale of all that we can play.
And you can use that to play lead guitar over any song.
