Pad Synth Mode, Soft Pad setting-all dials at noon except guitar level at 60, effect level at 50, resonance at 70, Zuzu guitar on Porter bridge single-coil, through Carr Vincent 1x12 combo: volume 8 o’clock, treble 2 o’clock, mid boost mode, bass 9 o’clock, reverb 10 o’clock, drive 10 o’clock, 33W.Pad Synth Mode, Slow Sweep setting-all dials at noon except guitar level at 88, effect level at 44, resonance at 78, tone at 100 Zuzu guitar on Porter bridge single-coil, through Carr Vincent 1x12 combo: volume 8 o’clock, treble 2 o’clock, mid boost mode, bass 9 o’clock, reverb 10 o’clock, drive 10 o’clock, 33W.Zuzu guitar on Zuzu neck humbucker and Porter bridge humbucker, through Carr Vincent 1x12 combo: volume 8 o’clock, treble 2 o’clock, mid boost mode, bass 9 o’clock, reverb 10 o’clock, drive 10 o’clock, 33W.
Once I understood it through learning chords and realized it was a diminished scale and you could play it right off a #9 chord, that was the sound that I heard. I heard that sound, and from that time on I experimented with the half/whole diminished scale. "Miles Davis would just play a b9 right on top of a seventh chord as his first note. One aspect of that scale's sound is the b9, which is a note Miles Davis often sat on. At one point, I just asked him, 'How do you play all that out shit?'" That was in 1971." "We were on the bill with Larry Coryell at a club long gone in L.A. At one point, I just asked him, 'How do you play all that out shit?' He said, 'I use the half-step whole-step scale.' And I was like, 'Okay.' I went back to my hotel room and went G, G#, A#, B, and I worked out the scale. "We were on the bill with Larry Coryell at a club long gone in L.A. "A long time ago, I was 19, and my brother Patrick, a drummer, and I were playing with Charlie Musselwhite," Ford says. Ford was a member of Davis' band in 1986, although he began using that scale much earlier. It's a scale that's been in the jazz repertoire for decades and was a huge part of the Miles Davis sound throughout the 1980s. ( For more insight, watch Robben Ford explain-and play-diminished scale blues in this video.)Ī big part of Robben Ford's playing is his use of the half/whole diminished scale, which is an eight-note scale that alternates half-steps and whole-steps over the course of an octave.