Basic Pentatonic Scale
Escolastico Hall
Guitar scales are organized sequences of notes played in an ascending or descending order that help you build finger strength and dexterity. Practicing guitar scales also makes you more familiar with the notes on your fretboard, develops your musical ear, and provides a framework for creating melodies for your own original songs.
For those that want to expand their scale horizons, the available Player Pack on the Fender Tune app features a dynamic scale library with a variety of diagrams and patterns for any variation, flavor, and key. And for those looking to brush up on the basics or just dive into scales for the first time, Fender Play has a wealth of videos that offer step-by-step guides of basic scales that will serve you well.
The E minor pentatonic scale in the open position is ground zero for soloing. Led Zeppelin's "How Many More Times," "Back in Black" by AC/DC and "Rumble" by Link Wray are a few popular songs that feature this scale.
The E minor pentatonic scale only contains five notes instead of the standard eight (octave) notes found in all major or minor scales. Rather, pentatonic scales are abbreviated scales that follow a certain pattern, taking five notes from the corresponding octave-based scale, removing three of those eight notes. (More on that later in this article!)
In this Technique of the Week, Leah Wellbaum (Slothrust) teaches the E Minor Pentatonic using the open strings, hammer ons and pull offs. Wellbaum also plays portions of the scale under chords which is a common technique used in her songs.
Some common songs that utilize the A minor pentatonic scale are "Stairway to Heaven" from Led Zeppelin and "Hoodoo Bluesman" by Junior Wells, to name a few. Learn to play the A minor pentatonic scale.
Learning the C major scale will help you understand the key of C, and because it doesn't have any sharps or flats, it's a great entryway into musical composition. To simply play it all on the B string, you'll need to follow a whole step / whole step / half step / whole step / whole step / whole step / half step formula. You can actually play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" using this method!
The E harmonic minor scale is used often in classical, jazz, and metal music, as it can spice up your solos. One way to get to know the E harmonic minor scale is to play it all on the High E string, going from the open position to the second fret (whole step), second to third fret (half step), third to fifth fret (whole step), fifth to seventh fret (whole step), seventh to eighth fret (half step), eighth to 11th fret (minor third), and 11th to the 12th fret (half step).
You can apply this formula starting with any root note to play a major scale in any key. You can hear major scales across every genre and a nearly endless amount of songs. Its bright, upbeat tone makes it ideal for danceable pop songs, rock stadium anthems, and more.
If you use the root notes (black circles) as a reference for where the scale starts, then you can see that the five notes are repeated a little over two times over the span of almost two and a half octaves.
As you can see, the minor pentatonic scale starts on the same note as the major pentatonic shape but uses a different pattern. One is made up of notes included in the key of G major, while the other is made up of notes included in the key of G minor.
Shape #1: The first shape is one you should be familiar with already. Position one of the major pentatonic scale is based on an E major shape G major chord. If you compare the scale to the chord, you can see how the shapes fit on top of one another. The scale contains all the notes from the chord and includes a few others from within the key.
Shape #3: As we continue up the fretboard, we get a pentatonic shape that outlines a C major shape G major chord. Every shape is still just that same five-note scale repeating through different octaves. The G notes are still displayed as the black circles since this is still a G major pentatonic scale.
Pentatonic Navigation Tips
You know all the pentatonic shapes, but how do you tie them all together to sound like your favorite guitar players? Learn all about the connected pathways between the pentatonic scale shapes with this lesson from Nate Savage.
Minor Pentatonic Magic
Embark on a minor pentatonic journey with Ayla Tesler-Mabe. Learn tips and tricks for breaking out of the pentatonic box so you can improvise solos with more feeling and emotion.
Andrew Clarkeis a guitarist, educator, and content creator from Vancouver, Canada. He's best known for his YouTube channel, where he creates easy-to-follow guitar lessons and informative guitar gear videos. Andrew also manages The Riff.
Pentatonic scales were developed independently by many ancient civilizations[2] and are still used in various musical styles to this day. As Leonard Bernstein put it: "the universality of this scale is so well known that I'm sure you could give me examples of it, from all corners of the earth, as from Scotland, or from China, or from Africa, and from American Indian cultures, from East Indian cultures, from Central and South America, Australia, Finland ...now, that is a true musico-linguistic universal."[3] There are two types of pentatonic scales: those with semitones (hemitonic) and those without (anhemitonic).
Anhemitonic pentatonic scales can be constructed in many ways. The major pentatonic scale may be thought of as a gapped or incomplete major scale, using scale tones 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 of the major scale.[1] One construction takes five consecutive pitches from the circle of fifths;[8] starting on C, these are C, G, D, A, and E. Rearranging the pitches to fit into one octave creates the major pentatonic scale: C, D, E, G, A.
Another construction works backward: It omits two pitches from a diatonic scale. If one were to begin with a C major scale, for example, one might omit the fourth and the seventh scale degrees, F and B. The remaining notes then make up the major pentatonic scale: C, D, E, G, and A.
Omitting the third and seventh degrees of the C major scale obtains the notes for another transpositionally equivalent anhemitonic pentatonic scale: F, G, A, C, D. Omitting the first and fourth degrees of the C major scale gives a third anhemitonic pentatonic scale: G, A, B, D, E.
Each mode of the pentatonic scale (containing notes C, D, E, G and A) can be thought of as the five scale degrees shared by three different diatonic modes with the two remaining scale degrees removed:
Each mode of the pentatonic scale (containing notes C, D, E, G and A) features different intervals of notes from the tonic according to the table below. Note the omission of the semitones above (m2) and below (M7) the tonic as well as the tritone (TT).
For example, the slendro anhemitonic scale and its modes of Java and Bali are said to approach, very roughly, an equally-tempered five-note scale,[15] but their tunings vary dramatically from gamelan to gamelan.[16]
Giacomo Puccini used pentatonic scales in his operas Madama Butterfly and Turandot to imitate east Asian musical styles. Puccini also used whole-tone scales in the former to evoke similar ideas.
The major pentatonic scale is the basic scale of the music of China and the music of Mongolia as well as many Southeast Asian musical traditions such as that of the Karen people as well as the indigenous Assamese ethnic groups.[citation needed] The pentatonic scale predominates most Eastern countries as opposed to Western countries where the heptatonic scale is more commonly used.[65] The fundamental tones (without meri or kari techniques) rendered by the five holes of the Japanese shakuhachi flute play a minor pentatonic scale. The yo scale used in Japanese shomyo Buddhist chants and gagaku imperial court music is an anhemitonic pentatonic scale[66] shown below, which is the fourth mode of the major pentatonic scale.
In Javanese gamelan music, the slendro scale has five tones, of which four are emphasized in classical music. Another scale, pelog, has seven tones, and is generally played using one of three five-tone subsets known as pathet, in which certain notes are avoided while others are emphasized.[67]
Somali music uses a distinct modal system that is pentatonic, with characteristically long intervals between some notes. As with many other aspects of Somali culture and tradition, tastes in music and lyrics are strongly linked with those in nearby Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Sudan.[68][69]
In Scottish music, the pentatonic scale is very common. Seumas MacNeill suggests that the Great Highland bagpipe scale with its augmented fourth and diminished seventh is "a device to produce as many pentatonic scales as possible from its nine notes" (although these two features are not in the same scale)[clarification needed].[70][failed verification] Roderick Cannon explains these pentatonic scales and their use in more detail, both in Piobaireachd and light music.[71] It also features in Irish traditional music, either purely or almost so. The minor pentatonic is used in Appalachian folk music. Blackfoot music most often uses anhemitonic tetratonic or pentatonic scales.[72]
In Andean music, the pentatonic scale is used substantially minor, sometimes major, and seldom in scale. In the most ancient genres of Andean music being performed without string instruments (only with winds and percussion), pentatonic melody is often led with parallel fifths and fourths, so formally this music is hexatonic.[citation needed]
The Orff system places a heavy emphasis on developing creativity through improvisation in children, largely through use of the pentatonic scale. Orff instruments, such as xylophones, bells and other metallophones, use wooden bars, metal bars or bells, which can be removed by the teacher, leaving only those corresponding to the pentatonic scale, which Carl Orff himself believed to be children's native tonality.[76]
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