Watch the Natural Thing online guitar lesson by Jeff McErlain from Breakthrough Blues-Rock Soloing

Okay, there's a lot of stuff going on here! What I would really shoot for overall, knowing this is a somewhat challenging guitar solo, is understanding how I'm mixing both G major and minor pentatonic scales. The chord progression is G to C, so when we have two chords like this the proper scale can be somewhat ambiguous. We could be in the key of G major or we could be in the key of G Mixolydian. In rock 'n' roll, I'll almost always take Mixolydian! G Mixolydian is spelled G-A-B-C-D-E-F-G. If we were to spell out our chords: G major is G-B-D, C major is C-E-G, and putting them in order we would get G-A-B-D-C-E. The only one we don't have is the F. As a general rule, blues rock is rarely used and Ionian (major) scale, it just doesn't sound that bluesy. The Ionian scale would have a natural seventh degree, and this case that would be F#. Try playing that over this chord progression and see what it sounds like. It won't be bad, but it won't be correct for a classic bluesy rock sound!

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