What’s up my fellow guitar comrades, Darrin Goodman here from GuitarControl.com with another little guitar lesson for you. Today I want to talk about pentatonic guitar scales.
A Pentatonic Scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave and is very common and found all over the world. The pentatonic scale is a staple in the sound of blues guitar and is also used in rock, metal, country and even jazz. It is made up of five unique patterns called “the five positions of the pentatonic scale”. Today we will look at the first position, which is by and large the most widely used one.
This is an A minor pentatonic scale in the first position.
In this key it consists of the notes; A, C, D, E, and G and simply starts over again, notice that there are 12 notes shown on the tabs. The scale consists of the intervals of; root note, minor third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth and a minor seventh.
Practice the scale both ascending and descending and in different keys and positions on the Fretboard. There are more licks than you could even count that are based out of this pattern. It is a must for any guitarist to know this pattern.
Let me share a couple of cool tricks that you can do to this scale.
Major pentatonic
By simply moving the sequence down one and a half steps or three frets, you get the major pentatonic scale. So in the key of A you would simple start on the second fret instead of the fifth fret.
The Blue Note
Another cool and useful trick is to add the Blue Note. What’s the blue note? Good question! The blue note is the diminished fifth, which is basically flattening the fifth note one half step. This puts a chromatic sequence into the scale and gives the scale an instant blues vibe.
You can get more great stuff about this with the course “Killer Guitar Control Secrets”. You can check it out here https://guitarcontrol.net/gc-preview/gcblog4/main.php
I’m off to play some guitar,
Darrin
