Noel Gallagher's Pentatonic Masterclass (Don't Look Back In Anger)

N Gallagher is such an underrated guitar player but for many of us he's a huge inspiration and what we're about to see here is an absolute master class in how to craft a solo from how to use the pentatonic how to shift around the neck and how to play simply but with Melody so we'll be looking at Don't Look Back in Anger and the original track has got so much great guitar playing loads of great feels all the way through but here we're just going to Zone in on the main solo and I'm taking this live from nworth in 1996 now as as we watch through just pay attention to how he starts in the middle of the guitar comes right down low and then works his way all the way up to the top but constantly building and building the energy as we go through it's really great so let's take a watch [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] now there's three things I think we can all take away from this solo firstly n's songwriter mindset secondly his use of pentatonic shapes and how he moves diagonally across the neck and then thirdly his use of repeats to create a really memorable solo so starting with the songwriter mindset and what we've got going on here are the chords F to F minor and then resolving back to C so it's like four to four minor resolving back to the one so we're in the key of C major here and no's using the c major pentatonic which is just the same as the a minor pentatonic in the first position I always say the first note tells you which minor key you can use it over so this is the a minor pentatonic but then the second note here tells us which major key in this case this is a c here at the eth Fret so that is exact same shape we can use over C major and this is n's starting point now in theory this position is always going to work great for soloing over C major but in this case we've got this F minor chord which contains an A flat and this kind of contradicts against the a natural that occurs in the c major pentatonic so we might need to find something different to do now Paul Davids made a video with this exact same chord change in it f to F minor and got a load of YouTube play a solo over it and pretty much without exception they all used their intricate Theory knowledge to find a way to Target the a flat as soon as that F minor chord came in maybe you know doing all that kind of stuff but n just doesn't think like that he's thinking much more like a singer and much more going where the melody just naturally leads him so what he does is takes his D at the seventh fret on the G string and plays a series of bends and you can hear over the F minor that bend really works nicely but you wouldn't automatically think there's an F minor cord I'm going to take a d and bend it up to an E or an E flat but to him he's just being led by the melody and it's really a lesson to us all to allow that kind of natural flow of music rather than always just going to the absolute Theory approach and saying well there's an F minor I have to play an A flat [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so hopefully we can see really clearly that null's starting off using this C major a minor pentatonic position here with the first [Music] lick that kind of thing then the second time around he uses a bit of repetition with those same three bends down to there but then something interesting happens he does this and ends up on this root note of C here down at the third fret on the a [Music] [Applause] string now he could have played that note here at the eighth fret on the low E string and it would have been exactly the same note that he's actually doing something really important here which is setting himself up for the diagonal pentatonic which brings us on to our second point which is how he uses shifts across the [Applause] [Music] neck so what he's doing here is Shifting in order to get into this pentatonic shape so I've spoken about this so many times on my channel it's kind of the 2+ three diagonal and one way we can think of this is in the major key here's our root note of C here third fret on the a string and we can think of it as being two notes below and then two notes above so the two notes below G and a so three and five on the low E and then up to our root note of C third fret on the a string there and then two notes above C at the fifth fret and then slide up to the seventh for an e like so so five notes in total the complete C major pentatonic so that's the shape but then we can just repeat that on the other strings so now right under our fingers start up the fifth fret on the D string here we've got a g and then an a at the seventh and then up to the fifth fret of the G string for our root note of c and then our two notes above D and slide up to e so that exact same pattern we can now play on the d and g strings then coming up to the B string we start the eighth for the G 10th for the a so that's our two notes below then our root note of C there at the eighth on the high e and then two above D and slide up to e so exactly the same again join all that together and we get a really powerful pentatonic shape which really takes us right across the neck now no's using this pattern to transition across the neck and even though he's coming down low at this point you really feel the energy in the track starting to build so this is a great technique to add some shape to your so those he kicks off this line just by playing through the pattern up to the G string like so hitting that root note of C [Music] there and then mixes it up with a band and then carries on up to the B and high strings so I guess he's just feeling his way through in a way that makes sense to him so the pattern in its original kind of raw [Music] form and then null turns it into [Music] something like that so it's a really cool way that he's just taking the really basic concept of the scale and turning into something [Music] musical then let's talk about n's use of repeats and we already talked about at the beginning how he took these three bends and repeated them twice round which really makes you feel like you understand the purpose of the solo and it connects in the listener's ear but now we're reaching the crescendo of the solo and he's going into this type of thing we're taking a pretty simple idea of eight and 10 on the B string and then eight on the high e and just circling around those three notes in a kind of triplet fashion now it must be said there's not much melodic value here it's just you know a repeating pattern but what it does is really connect with the listener in terms of its Rhythm and energy I think at one point he also hits this D at the 10th fret on the high E [Music] string something like that just to mix it up I don't really know the exact notes he's playing but it doesn't really matter it's much more about energy and drive here and then he closes out the solo and really Peaks the energy with even more repeats using these Unison bends up here so we've got 19th bre on the G string bending a d up to an E which then matches with the E here at the 17th fret on the B string so it's kind of Out Of Tune as the bang goes up and then the two notes come together in tune now once again really then starts to add to the energy of the track and you can really feel it's coming to its Crescendo to its end here so really great way to end now it's also worth thinking about this Bend he could have played it here in the position he was already in on the high E string or he could have played it here on the B string to then get the Unison with the same e on the top E string there and it would have been exactly the same notes the same pitch but he comes up to here to play it which is kind of thicker but I think more the reason is is cu he doesn't really think in terms of positions and cage and all that stuff he likes to stick to the first position pentatonics so he started off in this one down here and then used exactly the same shape but now an octave High up here so he kind of knows the first position pentatonics and then the diagonal shape kind of transitions him around the neck so it's a more simplistic way of playing than some people approach but it just proves that that simple approach does really [Music] work another thing I'll just point out because I often get criticized for which fingers I do or rather don't use in particular lack of using the smallest finger but you'll see here he's just really just using these first two fingers and getting other licks in there as well with those two perfectly valid to do it in this way you'll also see Gary Moore and people like that doing this so there's not really a need to stick to set fingers for set Frets particularly once you get up here and it's all a bit crammed in [Music] together and then the very last thing a bit of pck scraping just to bring it to an absolute close the technique that you can do even if you've never touched a guitar before in your life so I hope you enjoyed the video and you can see that if you're a beginner or intermediate player then N Gallagher is a great player to study now if you're watching that thinking I don't understand all these pentatonic shapes and how he's shifting around the neck then I've left some links to some of my stuff below but for now thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video