The Dreaded Key Of Eb

The key of Eb is a common problem area for guitarists and bass players as our instruments start on an E and often leave us craving one extra fret to let us get that semitone lower.

The first thing most players do in this situation is to move the classic major scale shape up to the 6th fret of the A string and play the whole song an octave up. This is fine if you don’t mind missing out a whole octave of notes, but it is much more practical to know where the scale tones are below the root.

To learn this, we are going to look at an Eb7 chord and find all the notes in the first position on the fretboard. First, familiarise yourself with the following fingering patterns of Eb7 to help remember the shape and sound of the arpeggio:

The notes in the chord of Eb7 are Eb, G, Bb and Db. To play this chord at the bottom of the fretboard, we simply need to find all of the notes in this position:

Once you have learnt this scale in the first position, get creative with it! Come up with riffs, songs, fills or whatever you want just to get you used to the feel and shape of it. When you’ve done that you should be ready to tackle the next riff…