Ordinarily I try to stay away from clickbait videos on youtube. Unless it has to do with cooking or tying knots or some other skill I am working on developing, I try to avoid it all. But once in a while I click on guitar/theory/music related ones just to see what people are on about; once in a while there are real gems, but usually it’s super annoying!
On this fine early spring Saturday morning I saw Matteo Mancuso’s smiling face and, knowing how brilliant he is, I clicked. The title of course was full on clickbait and the comments section was a den of keyboard music theory warriors crying foul of his use of non major scale note choices. I felt this was a bit over the top and his solo sounded pretty diatonic to my ears as he weaved around the non-diatonic chords in the progression. Obviously there were a couple of nods to the changes but I chose to transcribe the solo to see to what extent my ears might have been deceiving me. I was stoked to find that my original impression was the accurate one.
There is no question that Matteo Mancuso is one of the young shining lights of guitar music, his chops, his improvisational skills, his tone, his demeanour, he is everything that a successful young professional musician needs to have; take note if you are aspiring to make music your career: be a good person who plays exceedingly well and you have a shot at paying your bills with your instrument for your whole lifetime!
The thing that invariably makes me shake my head a little is the comments section. Uuuugh!! Now, this video (to which I will link below) is supposed to be an example of Matteo playing on a soulful little loop using only the C Major scale. The progression is as follows: ll:CMaj7 / / / l E7 / / / lFMaj7 / / / lG7 / / / :ll On the 3rd repeat the G7 is replaced by an Fmin7 (a tasty little iv-7 is never a bad choice, unless it happens everytime!).
Obviously this is a highly skilled and tasty piece of guitar mastery! The frustrating thing is twofold. First of all it’s the clickbait title: no one can just “unlock” the major scale and play like this. The scale is not the only part of what is happening here! The chord changes are the prism through which the light of the notes refract and create different colours. The chord progression is also 1/4 non-diatonic, i.e. the E7 chord presents some navigational issues that might force a novice guitarist/improvisor to question their life choices when they keep landing on the G natural and being made to wonder why it sounds the way it does. The Fmin7 in the 3rd repeat is non-diatonic as well, forcing the player to navigate a chord that has just shifted two of the major scale’s notes to the flat side (Ab, Bb and Eb in this case). So we’re doing a lot more than “unlocking” the Major Scale! Come on Paul!
The second frustrating aspect of falling for clickbait titles is the Comments section! Now just like I’m doing here we have almost nothing but people crying foul on the title as well. Most everyone is choosing to point out that there is more going on than just the Major scale. Lots of observations of b13s, which is not exactly correct in a sense because while an Ab is inded the b6th of the key of C, it happens to be sounding during the E7 chord. This makes it enharmonically a G#, which would make it more accurately a #5 but even more accurately it has, in that moment, nothing at all to do with being a #5 in C because what it really is is a beautifully rendered M3rd on the E7 chord which he arrives at by enclosing within a little E, G, A, melodic sequence which is at once diatonic, and also sweetly pentatonic. Speaking of Pentatonic. One commenter suggested it wasn’t all the Major scale, it had pentatonics as well. We would all do well to appreciate that the pentatonic scale is a frame of the Major scale in the same way that 2x4s are the frame of the house but there is a lot more going on in the finished house than just the studs. Any pentatonic scale is contained within 3 different major scales and so it is not “not the majorscale” just because Matteo chose to use a note sequence that fit within our conventional sense of what a pentatonic scale position “feeeeels” like.
There are two very fleeting moments in bar 8 and near the end in bar 14 where Matteo spices up the solo with a b3 blue note on the C chord. In bar 14 he does this sweet bend from the 10th fret D to the 12th fret E but upon the release of the bend he does a quick little half step bend up to the Eb/b3 (11th fret)then back to the D. He then completes the phrase by pulling-off to the C and returning to the D. This is a very expressive technique and is very difficult to pull off so you should spend some time trying to get it. The early example is a quick upper neighbour slide that is truly felt more than it is heard. But calling these little embellishments non-diatonic is as overblown as claiming that Indian raga is microtonal. It really isn’t that microtonal. Indian Raga is predominantly diatonic/modal with chromatic embellishments that stand out to our ears because they are not the embellishments that most of us are accustomed to hearing.
Anyhoo. In bar 12 Matteo comes across the Fmin7 chord and chooses to express himself on this chord by playing a speedy descending phrase in what is essentially F Dorian but he passes chromatically through the E natural, hearkening to the Be-Bop dominant scale but is otherwise just playing diatonically the most inside note choices possible for the F minor sonority. Yes it’s outside of the C Major scale but ny the tone of the comments section you’d think he just quoted a Schoenberg 12-tone row!
In closing remember, Click Bait sucks and don’t read the comments section when anything related to music theory is being tossed around because it will be 98% overblown and wrong and you will lose brain cells in the process of trying to keep up with the rage bait of the average person’s posts: )
So here is my transcription of Matteo’s great romp through Paul David’s backing track. Have a look at the notation and you will see very few instances of accidentals. In my summation he did a stellar job of keeping his ideas within the boundaries of Mr. Davids’ prompt!
Thanks for visiting patterngeneration.ca and Happy Practicing!!
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