Jerry Cherry | Pitting The Cherry

Hello Cherries! Thank you for your service on this Memorial Day! Centering your improvisation around the tonic while playing through a chord progression is an excellent way to create tension and release. By sustaining or targeting the tonic, you generate dissonance against changing chords, which resolves beautifully when your lines return to stable chord tones. We always tend to follow the changes or play the changes or play through the changes. Some of the best players actually only played one scale through the changes. Playing this way gives a certain rub over the chords that you don’t get when you’re playing all the chord tones from a progression. Check out 3 examples of this in the video. Also, I'm playing an acoustic duo gig with Shannon Conley at The Red Lion on Bleecker St, NYC today from 4-7pm. Love to see ya. Enjoy the video and have a great Memorial weekend.  

Hello Cherries! Switching pentatonic scales using the CAGED system means playing the pentatonic scale that matches the underlying chord of the progression, while keeping your hand in the same position on the fretboard. Instead of jumping across the neck, you change the scale by targeting the specific chord tones nested inside the five familiar scale patterns. Check out the video at YouTube/JerryCherryBand to learn more and have a great week Everybody 🎸  

Most people will show you the Mixolydian and Dorian modes and how to switch between them. I’m going to show you the chords of the two modes and how to switch between them. This way you’ll fully understand how and when you can use these modes, and to create more interesting chord progressions. It’s also good to have a deeper understanding of where these modes come from. Enjoy the video and have a great week Everybody 🎸😊

John Mayer coined the phrase "The Pentatonic Equator" to describe a specific approach to navigating the guitar fretboard. When I first heard him explain this I didn't pay much attention to it. I recently heard someone else talk about it and I realized that it's the same exact thing that I've been teaching for a while now 🤨 This isn't a new concept just the phrase is. This works for any key and position. Here's a popular one. If you play the minor pentatonic starting on the 12th fret key of E, move it down 3 frets to the 9th fret and play the same thing thats an E Major Pentatonic. Mixing those two scales together make for some great stuff especially in the blues. You can make it as happy or sad depending on where you take it. The punchline is that without moving 3 frets down to play the major pent you can superimpose the scale right over the minor pent on the 12th fret. Same thing 3 frets down you can play the major and superimpose the minor right over th...

Hello Cherries! Playing the root note is not only a safe thing to do while improvising it also acts as a musical "home base," grounding your solo, providing clarity, and highlighting the chord changes for the listener 🧐 It's also great to understand what happens to that note as the chord changes. Say your playing a blues in G. You play a G note "Root." When it goes to the 4 chord C, that G note is now the 5th of C. So it's a solid note to lay on. The next chord D, the G is a 4th of D. Not the best note to lay on. You can move it down a half step to F# making it a 3rd, or up a whole step to A making it a 5th 🤨 Doing this in any style of music is important. It allows you to really narrow in on the notes of the chords and their relationship to one another. It all starts with the root note 😊 In this video I'll show you a great way to phrase your solo's starting on the root. Then we'll play different intervals off the root note and see how those in...

Hello Cherries! It's common to learn the minor pentatonic scale. Most people learn shape 1 and it last them a life time, and that's pretty cool 😊 In that shape 1 you also have a chord shape that matches, the Em shape. Add 2 more notes to that pentatonic scale now you have the full natural minor scale. You can actually superimpose all 3 shapes, chord, pent, minor scale on top of each other and see that it lines up like a puzzle. It's a great visualization trick 👍 To take it a step further you can do this in 4 other positions on the fretboard 🤨 It's a concept called the CAGED System. Based off of 5 chord shaped C A G E D. This first shape was built off of the E shape. The other 4 shaped are built off the CAGD shapes but in a minor fashion 😁 This system is the best way to approach the guitar that I've ever seen. It organizes the guitar in the best way posable so that everything you learn gets applied to it. The system is as old as the guitar itself. It's nothin...