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Tutorial - Playing Outside
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Playing Out - Side Stepping

Tom Quayle 164 lessons

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Okay, how did you get on with that then? Hopefully it was okay...

Our second method is really simple to understand and I'm going to call is 'side stepping'. This is a method which is tailor-made for guitarists as it's a very visual method of playing out used by John Scofield a great deal.

The idea is simple - whatever phrase you just played, shift it up a fret and play it again or a variation of it. In this manner we 'stepped' the phrase up a fret which many musicians refer to as 'side stepping'. Moving the phrase down a fret also works.

Pentatonic scales tend to work especially well here as it's very easy to play the same phrase up one fret and then move it back down again. The standard pentatonic box shapes that every guitarist uses are tailor made for this concept.

Check out the next video where I play over the Am7 backing track and use this side stepping idea to play out.

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