Short Technical Study #14 (Altered Pentachords) Dominant 7 Pentatonic Voicings + backing track

Short Technical Study #14 (Altered Pentachords) Dominant 7 Pentatonic Voicings

With the material presented in this series (Short Technical Studies) I seek to demonstrate some of the creative and fun ways in which I like to isolate and work on specific techniques on the guitar. Each study is designed with a unique concept and goal in mind and utilizes a variety of ways in which the technique can be used on the instrument.

In Study #14 I present to you a fun system by which you can extract chord voicings from pentatonic scales to create a rich and smooth modal harmonic canvas all over the fretboard.

For this study I will concentrate on the “Altered Pentatonic Scale” as presented in my book “Paint-A-Tonic: Abstract Dominant 7 Pentatonic Sketches.”

This scale contains the root, #9th, 3rd, #5th/b13th and b7th of the chord. (See Pentatonic Modes diagram attached) To extract chord voicings from it we can pretty much select any 3 or more notes from the scale and then transpose each voice (note) of the resulting harmony through the five modes of the altered pentatonic scale to produce its modal sequence.

There are so many options of chordal textures to explore and the possibilities are vast. Here I present to you some 4-note altered pentatonic chordal textures for a G7alt harmony that I like a lot.

We can physically position the newly extracted chords on three different sets of four adjacent strings: 4th to the 1st, 5th to the 2nd and 6th to the 3rd.

For more info please e-mail: hristo@hristovitchev.com