Optimum Guitar School Online

The pentatonic scale

A pentatonic scale is a scale that consists of five notes. It could in theory be any five notes, but the pentatonic scale presented here is the pentatonic scale traditionally used in Afro-American popular music, blues and rock. It corresponds to a natural minor scale with the 2nd and 6th tones removed, thus removing half notes from the scale. 

There are many reasons to learn the pentatonic scale. Its structure makes it particularly suitable for improvisation. But it's also a good introduction to scale playing in general and to the relative positioning of notes on the fretboard. When learning the different boxes within the pentatonic scale, focus more on learning the boxes as patterns rather than the specific notes you are playing. Once you know the boxes of the pentatonic scale and can move between them freely, it's time to add the missing notes to be able to play both minor and major scales across the entire fretboard.

When I teach the pentatonic scales, I focus on the minor scale at the beginning. Once the five boxes are learned, I explain the connection between minor and major.

The green dots are the root notes in minor and the red dots are the root notes in major. Just practice playing the scale a few times until the fingers know it automatically. Then scroll down and start improvising with the notes from thescale with the different backing tracks as a background.

These backing tracks are in F minor and A-flat major, and they work with the 5 boxes in the positions I show on this page. In backing track 1, 3 and 4 the green notes (F) are the root notes and in backing track number 2 the red notes (Ab) are the root notes. Good luck!

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