The Guitar Blog

Someday I wish I could honestly say that Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits was an influence in my playing, because he’s just amazing. He doesn’t use a pick, so his tone and lines are a tad difficult for me, so as usual, I went my own way with this one. I kept in mind that Knopfler likes to use Pentatonic string skips and open-string licks, so I incorporated some of that.

A minor pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five pitches per octave, derived by removing the 2nd and 6th notes from the parent minor scale. Using the song Money for Nothing as a reference (which is in G minor), the minor scale is composed of the following notes: G, A, B-flat, C, D, E-flat and F sharp, as illustrated below:

The minor pentatonic would then be A, B-flat, C, D and F sharp, and has the following pattern:

Try this lick slow, and experiment with variants like slides instead of bends, try doing it all in one string, or change the timing. The really great thing about using a pentatonic scale is you can even just do a scale run and add a bend here, a double-stop there, and it won’t sound mechanical.

Try to add a little spice to your licks by playing a C minor pentatonic lick where the song shifts from B-flat to C, instead of playing it in G. A fun thing that I do when I’m stuck in a rut is to shred the full minor scale, going up and down the fretboard; it’s useful in transitions where you want to emphasize a sudden shift in attitude, like say when the song is building to a head, changing time signatures or as an exclamation point.

That’s it for now; try to experiment going up and down that scale til next time! \m/