I recently saw Jimmy Herring with Widespread Panic when they came through Portland, OR. He's always been a favorite Guitar Hero of mine but I hadn't really listened to him much since the glory days of the P&F Quintet. I've grown quite a bit as a player and a theoretician since then so I've spent the past few weeks trying to analyze his techniques and use them to add more harmonic color to my solos. One of the concepts I've come across that I'd like to discuss is Pentatonic Substitution.
In a YouTube lesson I found on Pentatonic Substitution they were playing over a static Amaj7 chord in the Key of A Major (A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#) but playing minor pentatonic scales rooted on the Third (C#, E, F#, G#, B), or the Seventh (G#, B, C#, D#, F#). The idea is that you can use simple shapes you already know to play over harmonically rich chords without playing any "wrong" notes. There is a D# that is outside the A Major scale but the Augmented Fourth doesn't clash with the chord tones and adds a nice Lydian vibe.
Being a good Deadhead presented with a Maj7 vamp, the first thing I did was transpose everything to the key of E and play the "Eyes of the World" intro vamp into my looper. It only took me a few moments of jamming along to realize that I'd already been using these patterns on "Eyes" for quite a while when I play the mid 70's arrangement. The Third of E Major is G# and I use lots of pentatonic ideas when the bass and guitar trade solos after the last verse alternating between the roots of E and G#. The Seventh of E is D# and that appears in the Pentatonic 7/8 riff before the Dm7 Jam.
I wonder, were Jerry and Phil discussing theory one day and decided to use those concepts in the arrangement of the tune? Or was Jerry exploring some of these ideas in a jam session and the rest of the band caught on to it that way? Perhaps it was a bit from column A and a bit from column B?
In a YouTube lesson I found on Pentatonic Substitution they were playing over a static Amaj7 chord in the Key of A Major (A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#) but playing minor pentatonic scales rooted on the Third (C#, E, F#, G#, B), or the Seventh (G#, B, C#, D#, F#). The idea is that you can use simple shapes you already know to play over harmonically rich chords without playing any "wrong" notes. There is a D# that is outside the A Major scale but the Augmented Fourth doesn't clash with the chord tones and adds a nice Lydian vibe.
Being a good Deadhead presented with a Maj7 vamp, the first thing I did was transpose everything to the key of E and play the "Eyes of the World" intro vamp into my looper. It only took me a few moments of jamming along to realize that I'd already been using these patterns on "Eyes" for quite a while when I play the mid 70's arrangement. The Third of E Major is G# and I use lots of pentatonic ideas when the bass and guitar trade solos after the last verse alternating between the roots of E and G#. The Seventh of E is D# and that appears in the Pentatonic 7/8 riff before the Dm7 Jam.
I wonder, were Jerry and Phil discussing theory one day and decided to use those concepts in the arrangement of the tune? Or was Jerry exploring some of these ideas in a jam session and the rest of the band caught on to it that way? Perhaps it was a bit from column A and a bit from column B?