A human (wearing a custom Clarence White shirt by Hometown Jersey) plays a late-Nineties Fender Telecaster with Lollar pickups and a Parsons/Green B-bender. The minor pentatonic scale is quite possibly...
A human (wearing a custom Clarence White shirt by Hometown Jersey) plays a late-Nineties Fender Telecaster with Lollar pickups and a Parsons/Green B-bender.
The minor pentatonic scale is quite possibly the most used and, suffice it to say, over-used scale on the guitar. The open strings themselves even make up the notes of the E minor pentatonic scale. Still, this scale’s importance cannot be underestimated, as it is used in so many genres of music, from rock and blues to country and bluegrass.
With this being a quintessential scale for guitarists to learn, I’ve seen many who struggle with either the memorization of the patterns or how to connect the patterns and make them musical. In this lesson, all of that will be demystified.
The prefix, “penta,” meaning five, tells us there are five notes in this scale. Just as one would shift through a scale to create different shapes for modes, the same is done with this scale to generate five distinctive patterns on the fretboard. Memorizing these five patterns in sequence is often the typical process for beginners; however, rote memorization of shapes might not easily translate into the performance process.
With each “box,” to which they are sometimes referred, we see separate patterns moving across the fretboard. And the tendency can be to think of them simply as patterns as opposed to musical scales. Altering the learning process by looking at the scale as a one-octave series of notes in only one pattern rather than five individual patterns will allow a player to move effortlessly across the fretboard and be able to apply this scale in a more musical fashion much sooner.
Here’s the key (pun intended):
In the key of E minor, the notes