Theory Lab › One lick, four ways
One lick, four ways
Write a phrase as steps of a scale and it has three relatives you haven't played yet: the same steps backwards, the same steps turned upside down, and both at once. Composers have used this for five hundred years. It takes a guitarist about a minute.
Root
C C♯ / D♭ D D♯ / E♭ E F F♯ / G♭ G G♯ / A♭ A A♯ / B♭ B
Scale
Minor Pentatonic
Tempo −
+
Sound PluckedString Start from
a lick Blues lick Country bend Scale run Leaps Question
Your lick: click a square to put a note there, click it again to take it away. Rows are scale degrees (the root is 1 ); columns are eighth notes.
3′ 2′ 1′ 5 4 3 2 1 5ˌ 4ˌ 3ˌ
A C D E · C A ·
one string, root at fret 5: 5 8 10 12 - 8 5 -
· A C · E D C A
one string, root at fret 5: - 5 8 - 12 10 8 5
A Gˌ Eˌ Dˌ · Gˌ A ·
one string, root at fret 7: 7 5 2 0 - 5 7 -
Backwards and upside down · A Gˌ · Dˌ Eˌ Gˌ A
one string, root at fret 7: - 7 5 - 0 2 5 7
Hear all four in a row Copy as text The lesson
Hear the lick. It's five notes of minor pentatonic, the kind everyone plays. Now press the three other Play buttons. Nothing new was written, yet three new lines appeared, and all of them are still in the scale.
Backwards is the easy one: play the notes in reverse order with the rhythm reversed too. Upside down is the useful one: wherever the lick went up a step, go down a step, and the other way round, starting from the same note. The shape on the page flips like a reflection in water. Both gives you the fourth line.
Why in degrees? If you flip a phrase by exact semitones you leave the key. Flipping by scale steps keeps every note in the scale, so the upside-down version is instantly playable over the same chord. That's the version a soloist wants.
On the guitar. The frets under each version are on one string, so the shape of your hand does the same thing the picture does: backwards slides the other way, upside down climbs where it fell. Play all four over one chord and you've got a sixteen-bar idea from a one-bar lick.
Make your own. Click the grid. Short licks with one or two leaps work best; the leaps become the surprises in the flipped versions. Try the "Country bend" preset and listen to what upside-down does to it.
Schillinger drew these as the four quadrants of a graph (Book III, Variations of Music by Means of Geometrical Projection) and added "expansion", multiplying every interval, which we'll add here once the tab editor can do these transforms on a real phrase.
Practice task
Take a lick you already play. Enter it on the grid in whatever scale it comes from.
Learn the upside-down version on the same string, then on the neighboring string.
Over one backing track, alternate the original and its inversion for two minutes. Journal the pair.