Originally published July 13, 2024
We begin to tackle chord tone soloing (improvising melodies that emphasize notes from the chords of the song's progression) with Hendrix's enduring classic "Little Wing." In Part 1, you will practice using a different pentatonic scale for each chord, and you'll see how, in doing so, you're actually playing the correct "mode" for the song. In Part 2, we'll go deeper, so be sure to practice the six exercises in this lesson so that you're ready!
The full written lesson is in the PDF above. Ask your questions in the comments!
What follows is the written lesson — the full contents of the PDF handout, so you can read it here or download it above.
“Little Wing” is among my favorite songs for practicing improvisation. The chord progression is beautiful, contains chords rooted on all seven natural notes, and includes a non-diatonic chord that can keep you on your toes. The tempo is slow enough that thoughtful melodies respecting the chord progression are within reach of any intermediate player.
Although Jimi Hendrix played “Little Wing” in E♭-standard tuning, this discussion will be based on E-standard. The positions and fingerings are the same, but the notes will sound one semitone higher than the original recording.
Chord tone soloing refers to the art of emphasizing notes from key chords in a chord progression as they go by. A note is emphasized when played on a strong beat (like a downbeat) or held for longer than other notes in a phrase.
To do this, you will need to know the chords of the chord progression and maintain awareness of which chord is playing and which is coming next. You also need to identify chord tones on the fretboard quickly. With the right framework, this is just a matter of practice.
Often, but not always, a single scale will work over the full chord progression. In diatonic music, all of the chords come from one of the major scale modes, and that scale will usually be a good choice.
“Little Wing” consists of seven chords (plus one that chromatically passes between two others). Six of those chords come from the key of Em (or, equivalently, G), but one chord (F major) doesn’t fit that scale. This makes the progression non-diatonic, meaning we can’t entirely get away with using just one scale.
In the first five bars, we get one chord per measure: Em - G - Am - Em - Bm. After a quick chromatic passing chord of Bbm, the rate of change doubles, moving through Am - C - G - F - C and landing on D, which lasts for two bars. Although the tune is in 4/4 time, one measure of 2/4 keeps things interesting and helps propel the song forward.
When learning to improvise over any chord progression, the first step is to memorize the sequence of chords and train your brain to recognize where you are in the progression at any time.
Exercise 1: Practice finding and playing the chord roots while you listen to the chord progression on a loop. I recommend practicing this in a ~5-fret range for a while and then moving on to another five-fret range. Try frets 11-15 and then 6-10 to get started for this song. Work on quickly finding each chord root, primarily on the top four strings (DGBE), until that becomes easy; these notes will become your bullseyes for chord tone targeting.
Exercise 2: Once finding the roots is easy, practice finding three- or four-string triad voicings in the same fret ranges.
One of the nice features of the Little Wing chord progression is that it contains triads built on all seven natural notes: Am, Bm, C, D, Em, F, and G, so practicing this is both getting you ready to improvise and also helping you speed up your recall of the notes of the fretboard.
Guitarists often ask which scale to use when improvising over a chord progression. In this lesson and Part 2, I will share two main approaches to soloing over “Little Wing.” The first approach uses a different scale for each chord, which sounds crazy but works. That’s what we’ll cover here in Part 1.
The second is to use one primary scale throughout the progression, carefully targeting chord tones for each passing chord. Hendrix used a hybrid of these approaches, and I’ll explain his preferred approach and mine, which is slightly different. This will come in Part 2.
Playing the pentatonic scale associated with each individual chord provides phenomenal practice opportunities and works well with many chord progressions. For a major triad, play the corresponding major pentatonic scale; for a minor triad, play the corresponding minor pentatonic scale. It’s simple, and it works.
You may recall from my video on the modes that the major scale contains three different major pentatonic scales and three minor pentatonic scales. Since the major and minor scales come in relative pairs, these three sets of five notes overlap to fill out the seven-note scale. As a result, in any chord progression derived from a major scale mode, if we play the corresponding major or minor pentatonic scale along with each chord, we end up playing that major scale mode—one five-note subset at a time. One benefit of doing this is that it automatically increases your chances of playing good notes!
Let’s see this in practice with the diatonic chords from “Little Wing,” focusing on frets 11-15. The first chord in the song is Em, so we would play the Em pentatonic scale:
The second chord is G, so we would play the G major pentatonic scale:
Notice that both scales share exactly the same notes. This is because G and Em are a relative major/ minor pair.
The third chord is Am, so we would switch to the A minor pentatonic scale:
When the chord progression returns to Em, return to E minor pentatonic.
The fifth chord is Bm, so we would switch to the B minor pentatonic scale:
After the passing B♭m chord, we go back to Am and the A minor pentatonic scale for two beats, followed by the C major pentatonic scale for two beats:
Notice that the C major and A minor pentatonic scales share the same notes; they, too, are a relative major/minor pair.
The last four chords are G-F-C-D. You already know what to do with G and C. Let’s leave F for last since it’s not in the key of Em/G. On D, you’ll play the D major pentatonic scale. It shares the same notes as the Bm pentatonic scale because they are another relative major/minor pair.
If we superimpose all of the scales we’ve discussed so far, we get the G major or E natural minor scale:
This leaves us with the F major pentatonic, which we would play over the F major triad:
You should practice this in stages. As you go, don’t try to remember complete six-string pentatonic patterns—that will defeat the purpose of the exercise. The goals of these exercises are to improve your root-finding speed, improve your speed at building a pentatonic scale around a root, and improve your speed at identifying target notes for your phrases.
Recall from the rectangle and stack video that the pentatonic scale can be broken into two simple shapes. These shapes are the same for the minor and major pentatonic scales, but the locations of the root, third, and fifth are different. If you haven’t already, commit these diagrams to memory:
The basic method has four steps:
To practice this, we’ll start simple and gradually ramp up the difficulty level.
Exercise 3: Choose a ~5-fret span. As before, I recommend 11-15 or 6-10. Start without a backing track, and take your time. For each chord in the progression, go through the four steps. See if you can hear the chord progression as you play your sequence of short phrases.
Exercise 4: In the same area of the fretboard, do the same thing along with a backing track.
Exercise 5: Practice targeting roots throughout the progression using short phrases and the same 4-step method. Then, practice targeting 3rds. Finally, practice targeting 5ths. For bonus points, practice targeting 9ths (two semitones up from the root).
Exercise 6: Go back through exercises 3-5 in a different 5-fret range. Rinse and repeat.
As a quick thought experiment, take a moment and recognize that although this was framed as a pentatonic scale exercise, you just got a lot of practice finding triads on the fretboard. We’ll put that to use next.
In Part 2 of this lesson, we’ll look at an alternative general approach to chord-tone soloing and discuss how Hendrix approached his iconic solo.
Little Wing
G · 70 BPM · 12 chords · 32.6s loop
Seventy BPM, one pass of the progression. The board takes a new pentatonic scale for every chord the way this lesson does — E minor over the Em, G major over the G, A minor over the Am — so what you are watching is the shape moving, not the fret numbers. Drag across any two chords to loop just that move; the six exercises above all live inside this one track.
Happy improvising!
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