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The next logical stepThere comes a time in a guitarist’s journey when the usual Minor Pentatonic and Natural Minor/Aeolian scales begin to sound stale and boring.
The next logical step is to explore the sounds you can make with more interesting scales, for example, the Harmonic Minor.
Most of us will begin to experiment with these scales in a soloing context, typically by improvising, which is a great way to explore a scale.
However, in this lesson I want to show you an alternative approach that you may not have thought about.
Just as you can write some great licks using exotic scales, I’ll demonstrate how you can also use them to write some really interesting heavy metal riffs.
Bands such as Lamb Of God, Dream Theater and Symphony X use this approach to great effect.
In the following examples, I’ll be using the E Phrygian Dominant scale to write two heavy metal riffs, each with a different approach and style.
This scale has an Eastern sound and is perfect for metal, with its flat second, major third and flat seventh intervals.
Figure 1 shows a one-octave A Harmonic Minor scale (ABCDEFG#A) on the A string of the guitar.
By starting on the fifth note, E, rather than the A, you’ll end up with the fifth mode of A Harmonic Minor, which is the E Phrygian Dominant scale (EFG#ABCDE).
Figure 2 shows the E Phrygian Dominant scale on the low E string:
Since both of these scales contain the same notes, think of the last two exercises as a map of the E Phrygian Dominant scale across the fifth and sixth strings.
By harmonizing this scale in thirds, you’ll end up with some useful two-note chords (called dyads) to aid you in building heavy metal riffs.
The dyads in the Phrygian