Hi. I'm Eric Madis from JamPlay.com.
In this lesson we're going to be covering the Memphis lead to dyads.
A Memphis lead is just a term that I use that I picked up many years ago
and I think a lot of the reason why people call these Memphis leads is because of the popularity of Steve Cropper as a guitar player.
Who is a sax studio guitar player.
He popularized these little dyads.
He wasn't the first person to do so, those are really older licks and they come from a certain type of theoretical background to playing.
These licks that I'm about to play you and I'm about to show you are for the E seventh chord or for the E chord.
Any kind of a blues situation where you are playing in E.
Not E minor but either E like a shuffle E like we've done or if you're playing an E seventh chord of some kind
and this would work especially well over that chord.
So let's go through these Memphis leads first.
Ok, we start here at the twelfth and thirteenth frets of the first and third strings, respectively.
So the first one, strike the third and the first string now if you are flat picking you have one of two things either strike the first one down
and the second one up or you can actually use a flat pick and a finger.
If you're finger picking you don't want to use your thumb, you want to use your two separate fingers
and I'll explain that later when we get more into finger picking.
Ok, there's the first one, the second one we bring it down two frets to the D major
and the next one what we're going to do is play on the ninth fret with both strings.
So you may either play this with your index finger and your second finger or your second and your third finger.
Depends on the person though many people prefer the second and third finger.
Doesn't matter, whatever is comfortable with you.
Now we're going to play the same thing two frets down on the seventh fret. That's a B minor.
Now we're going to go down another two frets and play the major version.
In other words, index finger on the first string and second finger on the third string and that's of the fifth and sixth frets, respectively.
Now we're back to the minor version so we're going to have the same frets .
Fourth fret on both strings, first and third at the fourth fret.
Now let's just come down one fret at a time, to the third, to the second
and then finally at the first fret we're just going to the third string and strike the open E.
This is the same thing as this, they're just an octave apart.
So let's look at this whole scale again.
Twelfth fret, thirteenth fret
Tenth, eleventh fret.
Ninth fret.
Seventh fret.
Fifth, sixth fret.
Fourth fret.
Third fret.
Second fret.
And first fret or actually open and first fret.
Now I call this the Memphis lead dyad scale so where does it actually come from.
This works over the E seventh chord.
Now if you know any theory you might know that the E seventh chord is actually the five chord or the fifth chord of the key of A major.
If you don't know that don't let that bother you. It's not going to stop you from playing the blues.
Certainly very few blues men of yesteryear even knew that kind of thing or maybe even cared.
So don't let it bother you but for those of you who are theory intensive you should know that if you we're to play an A major scale like this
and you were to build a chord from each one of those notes you would have an A major scale played in triads.
Ok, so as you can hear I'm actually playing the scale. Now if you were to play a dyad, in other words, the first and the third strings
in this case you're actually playing the first and the third.
You have this note.
These are based on the A major, B minor, C sharp minor, D major, E major, F sharp minor, G sharp diminished and A.
So that's actually what you have when you're playing an E seventh.
So you're playing a blues in E for that moment that you're playing E seventh, you're almost playing an A major.
A lot of jazz musicians would consider it that way and would play a lot of their ideas with that kind of harmony in mind.
So you may think about it as either playing an E seventh, specifically, or almost as though you're playing an A major
but with E being the tonic being your central note.
In any case what we want to do now is we want to look at this scale and we want to look at how we can use it.
Now the first thing we want to do is break this up into groups of four, four figures.
The first four.
Why four figures?
Well in the first place it's a really wieldy way of being able to use this entire scale.
There are times in which you will have enough time to play this entire scale
but a lot of times if you're playing blues, you'll only be playing your lick for one measure or two measures
and you need to change the key or change your focus when the next lick comes up or as you decide to change to come up with a new idea.
So to be able to really use these Memphis leads effectively it's good to be able to break them up into smaller pieces.
Usually, most blues is 4/4 time
and because of that if you can break your licks up into four pieces or into one measure segments you can have a very effective leg.
For instance that is a one measure lick if we keep count one, two, three, four.
Or if I want to play this in triplets and I want to make it 12/8 time like we've talked about.
You'll notice I'm going three, one, three, three, one, three, three, one, three, three, one, three as I'm striking the strings.
We call this first one descending number one. So Memphis lead descending number one.
So you'll notice it's the first four figures of that entire scale that I showed you.
Ok, descending number two skips the A and goes directly to the G sharp minor so we're going to come down from the fourth fret
to the first and the open.
Again, that's fourth, third, second and the first open. Now that's descending number two.
A lot of you may have already used that as a turnaround, you go
for that type of thing.
So that really common turn around utilizes these exact same dyads that I'm speaking about right now.
Now we can also play that last one backwards
and I call that the ascending Memphis dyad sequence.
So of our three groups of four we have descending number one,
descending number two
and ascending.
Now some of you might be saying "why don't you use this?"
If you listen to it, it sounds kind of weird.
Plus it really doesn't sound very authentic so that's why I usually just don't include that in there.
So it's not like we can't use those ideas at all.
For instance, we have things like sliding dyads
which we'll talk about more in just a few minutes.
Other than that we usually don't use this first one played backwards. We usually just play it as a descending.
Descending number two. And ascending.
So those are our three groups of four.
Next time when we get together we're going to talk about being able to use these in an entire sequence to play over a chord progression.