Pentatonic Gear Shift Overdrive: "Hidden in Plain Sight" Revisited

This lesson builds on the Pentatonic Gear Shifts lesson, showing how to integrate full diatonic modes into "gear shifts" while playing over changes. This is illustrated with a ii - V - I example. For anyone studying jazz, this is another game-changer.

Pentatonic Gear Shift Overdrive: “Hidden in Plain Sight” Revisited

In the Pentatonic Gear Shifts lesson, I demonstrated that to improvise over many chord progressions, you can shift the familiar pentatonic patterns up or down one string set, essentially using a family of three pentatonic scales to target chord tones for each chord in the progression.

In the first Pentatonic Gear Shift Overdrive lesson, I showed how you can also shift patterns horizontally to make certain transitions much easier to visualize.

In the “Hidden in plain sight” method, I showed how to transform a pentatonic scale into a major scale mode by adding two notes inside the rectangle and two notes around the stack.

This lesson is about connecting these ideas together.

Connecting “Hidden in Plain Sight” to “Pentatonic Gear Shifts”

Recall that inside the pentatonic rectangle, the two added “modal color notes” are shifted toward the bridge to play the Dorian or Lydian mode. This pattern represents the Dorian scale if the root is the lower note on the upper string, and it becomes the Lydian mode if the root is the upper note on the upper string. Since the Dorian mode is built on the 2nd scale degree of the major scale, and the Lydian mode is built on the 4th, we adopt the same naming convention as we did in Pentatonic Gear Shifts and call this the “ii/IV” rectangle:

Similarly, we can construct a “ii/IV” stack. It represents the Lydian mode if the root is the upper nut-side note of the stack or the Dorian mode if the root is the upper note on the middle string:

To play the Aeolian or Ionian mode, the two notes fall in staggered positions, giving us the “vi/I” rectangle and stack:

Finally, to play the Phrygian or Mixolydian mode, the two notes fall toward the nut in the rectangle and on the lower strings in the stack, giving us the “iii/V” patterns:

To use this in practice, we just have to remember whether we’re playing the neutral (“vi/I”) pattern, the shifted up (“ii/IV”) pattern, or the shifted down (“iii/V”) pattern. Conveniently, the extra notes follow this naming convention. They are literally shifted up toward the bridge or higher strings in the “ii/IV” pattern, and shifted down toward the nut or lower strings in the “iii/V” pattern.

Why bother doing this? Aren’t they all the same scale?

If you expand these into their full six-string patterns, you will notice that filling in the “extra” notes in this way ends up creating three identical patterns for any given region of the fretboard.

First, here is the “vi/I” pattern representing A Aeolian and C Ionian:

If we shift the pentatonic shapes up a string set and use the added notes from the “ii/IV” patterns to play the D Dorian and F Lydian modes, we get this:

And if we shift the “vi/I” pentatonic pattern down a string and use the “iii/V” patterns to play the E Phrygian and G Mixolydian modes, we get this:

All three patterns contain exactly the same notes…hopefully, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise!

At this point, you’re probably either having a lightbulb moment about modes and feeling like you can take on the world, or you’re thinking: “Modes are stupid! Why on Earth would I ever want to learn three different ways to play the exact same notes?”

If you’re in the latter camp, the rest of this lesson is for you. First, I’d like to gently correct you and say that you’re learning six different ways to play the same notes (we can’t forget about which note is the root of the scale!).

But more importantly, the benefit of using this approach is simple but profound: by shifting how we visualize these patterns over different chords, this approach dramatically changes which notes you emphasize in your lines and which licks you play over each chord. With this approach, at any point in time:

• you know exactly where the chord root is based on its position in the rectangle and stack shapes
• you know exactly where the third and fifth of the chord are based on the target note positions from the Pentatonic Gear Shifts lesson
• you can play pentatonic licks, which make your melodic intervals a little wider and make your lines sound more vocal
• and you can add in the modal “color notes” as an extra spice on demand.

Basically, you have a hierarchy of notes to choose from for each chord rather than just a collection of seven undifferentiated notes.

Example: Navigating a ii - V - I

Let’s combine this with Horizontal Shifts and show how you might use this to play over a ii - V - I progression in C. The chords are Dm - G - C, or if you’re feeling fancy, Dm7 - G7 - Cmaj7.

Note that in the following diagrams, I’ve added red circle notes to indicate the root of the chord, green diamonds to indicate 3rds, and blue squares to indicate 5ths.

We can start anywhere on the fretboard with a D minor pentatonic scale, and since it’s a ii chord, we’ll call it the “ii/IV” pentatonic and use the shifted up “ii/IV” fill-in positions. Like many players, I’m always tempted to start with Form 1, which happens to be at the 10th fret for D minor.

To move to the V chord (i.e., from “ii/IV” to “iii/V”), we can either shift down two strings or shift up two frets. Since shifting up is easier, and it still lets us use our Form 1 licks, that’s a nice choice here. And we fill in the extra notes using the shifted down “iii/V” pattern:

And then, to move from V to I, we shift up a string and use the neutral or staggered “vi/I” pattern:

It’s worth noticing some things from this example. For one, we only needed to find one note on the fretboard by name at the beginning, and everything else was found relative to that. For another, the G Mixolydian and C Ionian scales we created have the exact same fingerings, but they have very different hierarchies. This means that your note choices are likely to be different, and you can easily choose your target notes to create the level of tension and release you want on each chord.

Conclusion

I’m just starting to use this technique in my own playing, so I expect to have more to say about this topic later. But I hope this helped the concept of modes click for you in a new way, and I hope it gives you some new ideas for things to try on the instrument.

Happy jamming!