Guitar Gear

Just read an interesting article in the new issue of Guitar Player, where guitar great Wayne Krantz described a different kind of lead practice technique that eschews the use of scales and modes, and instead focuses on how the lead sounds irrespective of chords or fingerings. Wayne describes this practice technique as playing in a “zone.” A zone is only 4 frets wide, and you have stay within that zone, and pick only the notes that fall within that zone while you’re practicing – and importantly, you have to be disciplined to not venture out of the zone.

The idea behind this technique is that it forces you to let go of the patterns and scales you’ve learned and/or memorized, and makes you explore the tonal possibilities from within a zone.

In the article he uses something like a Abmb5b7 chord structure to start out with then, sets his zone from the 5th to the 8th fret, essentially in an “A” position. But because the base chord is a half step down, you really have to think about what you can pick within that zone. 

I tried it out, and it’s a lot harder than it appears. Without thinking about it, I went to my tried and true pentatonic minor scale, and it TOTALLY SUCKED against this chord! HA! So I just started playing around with the notes and was able to come up with some interesting – to say the least – leads. Here’s an example. The chord progression is Abmb5b7 / Gbm / Cbm7 / Gbm / Abmb5b7 / F#m / Cbm7 / Dbm7 / Gbm7. The lead’s pretty rough, but the cool thing is that it’s all spontaneous.

The fallout of this practice technique is that it really helps you be spontaneous with your leads. Once you figure out what works and what doesn’t in a “zone,” you can really start exploring. For instance, in the example I gave above, I just let GarageBand record in loop mode several times while I essentially just messed around. The result is a bit rough, but this exercise taught me a completely different way of exploring the fretboard.

Another cool thing is that you can move your zones around. I used the 5-8 zone, but I’m going to experiment and try something like the 13-17 zone to see where that takes me. Very cool indeed!