Okay, so I have played guitar for quite some time, but I chose to take up tattooing for a career for about 10 years which left me no time to enjoy playing anymore. So needless to say, I ended up rupturing a disc in my lower back that pulled me away from my tattooing career, unfortunately. However, I am proud to say that I have picked up the guitar once again, and this time I am more focused than ever on playing with a little bit of theory instead of screwing around playing cover songs and playing by ear.
Recently I stared relearning the E minor pent. scale to begin rehashing things and getting my fingers limber enough to move as quickly as I once used to be able to play. Doing my research has taught me that, say you use the key of E minor to write some tunes, the notes of E minor scale would be E F# G A B C D, and using those notes of the scale you have the chords Em, f#dim,G maj, Am,Bm,Cmaj,Dmaj and so on and so forth.
So I decided to start off playing these chords as fifth chords, the root and the perfect fifth which there is no third present making the chords neither maj nor minor. So, say I am trying to write a little punk or rock song with these chords.
Would I play the chords formed by this scale and just play them as fifth chords, or would you use the actual notes of the scale as the root note and add your fifth to it to form the chords? Example (F#) Low E second fret and the A string a C# ) ? I was always taught by other musicians to just transform the actual chords that are taken from the scale and turn them into fifth diads instead of playing the scale notes as roots.
Also, I watched some drop D lessons which were SO awesome, but I had the same question about playing the fifth power chords in Drop D after seeing an online guitar lesson in which the teacher used the notes of the blues scale on the low D string to create the fifth chords by adding the perfect fifth below it instead of playing the chords which arm formed by the scale which totally made me wonder what the hell I was doing lol. Say I am going to use that same E minor key and I want to use the E minor pent. scale for some little fun licks to add in.
Would I just play the chords in which that scale produces and transform them into fifth chords on that low E string, or do I actually play the notes of the scale using the roots and add the perfect fifth right under it? This confuses me, so if you could clear that up I would definitely owe you big time!
Thank you so much
Hopefully I can get a response which would clear my frustrated mind up for me, and I could get back to having some fun without over thinking this whole thing.
Anthony