Even though you’re not a guitar player, I’m pretty sure you know at least one musical scale, and I’m also betting it’s the C Major scale. The film The Sound of Music made famous the “do-re-mi” song that actually translates to a C Major scale (for complete beginners, the notes for a C Major scale are C-D-E-F-G-A-B).
But if your goal is to be a rocking lead guitarist, there’s a type of scale that you definitely must know, and that is the pentatonic scale. Pentatonic scales are the foundation for most rock and blues solos, and it’s important that you know how to make them.
Simply put, pentatonic scales have one major difference with normal scales: while normal scales have seven notes, pentatonic scales have only five (the term penta- means ‘five’). Other than that, there’s basically no difference. But how would I know which notes are in the pentatonic scales?
Let’s take that C Major scale. The notes for that would be C-D-E-F-G-A-B. If you take away the fourth note and the seventh note, you would be left with C-D-E-G-A. And that’s basically just how you make a pentatonic major scale: you take out the fourth and seventh notes of a major scale! So if you have a song that uses a C chord, you can master a solo on your guitar but NOT play F and B chords. The pentatonic major scale is a foundation of modern rock, and Jimi Hendrix is known to use the pentatonic major scale a lot.
The pentatonic minor scale is also created a bit differently. For a pentatonic minor scale, of course you would need a minor scale to begin with. Let’s take the A Minor scale for example. The notes for that would be A-B-C-D-E-F-G. For the pentatonic minor, however, you would need to take out the second and sixth notes, leaving you with A-C-D-E-G. The pentatonic minor scale is widely used in blues solo progressions.
A final observation: did you notice that the notes for the C pentatonic major scale are the same for the A minor pentatonic scale? That’s a weird relationship of pentatonic major and minor scales. Basically the notes of a pentatonic major scale for a given key are the same for a pentatonic minor for a key three steps down, but your root notes are different of course.
It may take a bit of practice for you to master pentatonic major and minor scales, but once you do perfect them you’re basically on the way to a better understanding of guitar soloing for blues or rock. And a final word: pentatonic scales have less notes, so they’re easier to remember and play! So go ahead and play!
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