Chords for GP CLASSIC: Robben Ford's "Miles Davis Pentatonic Scale"

_ _ _ _ [Bm] _ _ [C] _ _
_ _ _ [G] _ _ _ _ _
[E] _ _ _ [Gb] _ _ _ [A] _ _
[Em] _ _ _ [E] _ _ _ _ _
[D] _ _ _ [C] _ [B] _ _ _ [A] _
_ [E] _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Hi, _ [N] _ I'm Jude Gold from Guitar Player magazine and if you like those chords, well you're not alone.
Robin Ford fell in love with those chords when he heard keyboardist Robert Irving III
playing them when they were both on tour with Miles Davis.
As we all know, Miles Davis was one of those band leaders from whom really cool musical
concepts traveled downward from musician to musician.
[Eb] And I'd like to take this opportunity to show to you what Robin Ford showed to me, which
[Ebm] is a great little treatment [N] of the pentatonic scale, which you probably already know.
_ I call this Robin Ford's Miles Davis lesson because these are the chords that he learned
indirectly from Miles Davis.
To read more about it, you can pick up the July 2003 Guitar Player magazine or look for it online.
[D]
Our concept is very simple.
We're taking an [Bb] ordinary E minor pentatonic [E] scale. _ _ _ _
_ _ _ That's the [Eb] traditional way of playing the typical pentatonic box in E minor, the 12th fret.
But what we're going to do in order to get those nice chords that you heard, the chords
that Miles Davis taught us, we're going to try to play most of those notes on a single string.
So instead of going down the scale vertically, _ we're going to go horizontally and play it
all on the second string.
Second string.
_ [G] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ [Gm] _ _ _ [D] _ _ [Bm] _
_ [Gb] That's most of the scale, but play it on a single string.
What we want to do is we want to harmonize each one of those scale tones with a perfect
fourth that's stacked below the note, and then play that note again with the perfect
[F] fourth shifted down a [D] half step.
Here's the perfect fourth we're going to add.
It's on the third and [Cm] the fourth strings. _ _ _
_ [C] _ It would be awkward to finger it like that.
It's much easier to finger it like this.
_ _ We've now added a perfect fourth below that high E.
_ [B] Now all we need to do is slide that perfect fourth down a half step _ by refingering it as [Am] such.
_ [B] _ I simply took that fourth, those two notes, and moved them down, but I left [C] this note the same.
_ [Gb] _
That's the whole [N] concept right there, except that you have to do it for each one of the scale tones.
That's how you get [Am] that same.
[B] _ _ [A] _ _
_ [G] _ _ [Ab] _ _ _ [E] _ _
_ [D] _ _ [C] _ [Db] _ Kind of a nice way to open up otherwise kind of boring [Bb] pentatonic E minor jams, because
you're getting some extra flavors [G] in there, but you're still keeping things simple and
[B] you know, pentatonic.
_ _ _ _ _ _ [G] _
_ _ [Am] _ _ _ _ _ [D] _
_ _ _ [C] _ _ [G] _ _ _
_ [C] _ _ [Bb] _ _ _ _ _
[Em] _ _ _ [Bb] _ _ _ _ [E] _
_ [Em] _ _ [C] _ To show you a little bit more of how you can use it and hear how a pentatonic scale might
sound above it, let's make a little loop here.
_ [B] _ _ [Bb] _ [Em] _ _ _ [Gb] _
_ [F] _ _ [Eb] _ _ _ [Em] _ _
_ _ [E] _ _ _ _ _ [Em] _
_ [B] I'm going to take a little solo over the top [Gb] using just the plain [E] old pentatonic [Eb] scale.
[D] _ [Em] The one we know and love right up here.
[E] _ _ [Em] _ _ _ _ _ [B] _ _ [E] _ _ [G] _ _ _ [A] _
_ _ _ [D] _ _ _ [B] _ _
_ [E] _ _ _ _ _ [A] _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _