The NO THEORY Guide to Soloing Over Anything (Part 2)

In Part 1, we looked at soloing in the key of F Major and the three patterns you need to learn to be able to do this. In this part, we’ll look at the exact same concept only this time in C, or the key of C Major. This is a very popular key, if not the most popular key in rock music, so it’s well-worth getting acquainted with its chords and scale patterns.

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Here are the three scale patterns you need to learn. You’ll be pleased to know that they’re the exact same patterns we learned in Part 1, only now they start on C and come in a different order.

You’ll notice that the first pattern features some open strings. If you like this pattern, go ahead and use it. If you’d like to avoid open strings for the time being, use the one below; it’s the same pattern but up at the 12th fret.

If you’ve already learned the patterns from Part 1, you should be able to learn the patterns for C Major fairly quickly. Once more, the chord wheel below shows you which chords you can happily solo over using the above patterns.

Remember, if someone’s playing an Am, or any chord above in isolation, you can use the patterns to solo over it. For groups of chords (chord progressions) from the above selection, you can also wail over them using the scale patterns above.

If you compare this chord wheel to the one from F Major in Part 1, you’ll notice that they share a few of the same chords: Am, Dm, C, F, and G. All this means is that if you solo over these chords with C Major instead of F Major, you’ll get a different sound. Try it out – loop an Am and solo over it with both the F Major and C Major scales.

You can also use C Major to solo over the chords below:

m=minor, M=major
If you want to practice this using real songs, check out this list of songs in C Major over at songkeyfinder.com, which you can also use to find songs in the key of F.

In Part 3, we’ll look at the key of G.