Beginners’ Lesson

I hope you’ve been having fun with our looping exercises over the last couple of months. This month I want to look at one of the things that looping introduces us to which we can apply without looping—the idea of a pedal point, which is a note that stays the same while other aspects of the music move around it.

We’ve looked before at sustaining open strings while playing fretted notes on top, but this time we’re going to explore what’s called an inverted pedal point—having the unchanged note on the top rather than in the bass. Let’s jump in and then talk about how we can use it...

Example 1

As usual, if the ledger lines in the notation look scary, just focus on the TAB. Here we want to let each note sustain for as long as possible so they all overlap. I could have notated all the notes overlapping, but it would’ve made it harder to read, and remember what we said last month about the purpose of notation being to communicate clearly?

Here, the G is the note that we might otherwise loop. It’s in the same place in each bar, so we could remove the problem of