Pandiatonic Guitar

Juampy Juarez introduces pandiatonicism on the guitar — a system named by theorist and composer Nicolas Slonimsky (1894-1995) that uses every interval, triad, and chord inside a tonality without tonal function. Masters like Stravinsky in classical music and Bill Frisell in jazz love this sound, and Juampy shows how to bring it to jazz, fusion, and rock guitar.

What's covered

• Why pandiatonic playing avoids the third — building lines from seconds, fourths, fifths, sevenths, and ninths instead
• Seven-note series through the C major scale (fifths-and-fourths shapes, plus a series built on seconds) with exact fret positions
• Transposing each series to every degree of the scale to generate new material fast
• Applying the series over a Dorian pedal, as in So What and Impressions, and over modal or static vamps
• Using these ideas for intros, endings, riffs, composition, and improvising over swing
• Technique for the polyphonic material: fingers or hybrid picking
• Extending the concept to harmonic minor and melodic minor

If you feel that standard scales and chords are well-worn territory, this lesson opens up resources from modern classical music that are still rarely used in jazz guitar. Written materials in standard notation and TAB are included. Running time: 58 minutes.