5. Pentatonic Scales

Things You Need:

Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far,  you’re a guitar player! You know how the tune your guitar, how to read charts and tab, how to play the basic open chords and bar chords, and you may even understand some of the coloring tones that can be added to those chords. With those skills you can pretty much play, or attempt to play, anything you want. Getting your fingers to do the work can take years, but you have the building blocks to understand exactly what those fingers should do.

Many guitarists don’t have much more background than this, and are happy with the level of musicianship this knowledge supports. The next few sections will introduce skills that can help you play with other players, or improvise, or write music and more quickly figure out how to play things you might be interested in. A warning: there is some more theory involved. I have minimized that in my content, but you will find other content that does get heavily into theory – step around it when you want.

Core Topics:

Scales: just as chords are notes played together, scales are single notes played in succession. Learning scales will allow you to play solos, even improvised ones. It will also help you learn new riffs, as often these involve not just chords but single notes bringing things together. Most riffs you hear in popular music will use the basic chords you already know and the basic scales we are about to learn as building blocks. 

We will start with the simplest of scales: pentatonic scales. This just means that there are 5 notes in the scale. We’re going to learn two of them: the Blues Scale and the Country Scale. Even though they are simple, these scales form the backbone of most of the pop music made since the 50’s.

You will find an endless supply of instructional content online teaching you these scales and how to visualize, memorize, and utilize these scales online. Search for keywords “pentatonic scale”, “blues scale”, “country scale”, “major pentatonic scale”, “minor pentatonic scale”.  The content I will provide is just the way I learned it, and the way that I have subsequently visualized it for myself. You may have a different approach, explore!

The Guitar Board tool provides the Blues and Country Scales for all keys and all “positions” (places on the neck).  Try to establish patterns in your mind as you practise too – these will start to join together into a solid image of the neck as you progress.

  • Blues Scale in A: this is where it all started for me. Once I learned the blues in A I probably spent months just playing blues solos in one place on the neck. When you get bored with that you can start to both play in different keys and different “forms” (I use the term “form” here to mean different places on the neck).

Start with the Blues Scale in A in the first form, as shown below.

Play each note one at a time. For the first go around, just play the first 6 notes starting on the low E (6th) string, then play them again back to where you started. This is the full scale, ending at the “octave” (the same note you started one octave higher). When you can play this comfortably, add the rest of the notes shown – play them up and down until you are comfortable again. Now you know the scale. Find some content to play along with that is in the key of A, and try to play any of the notes above in any order you like. (Watch the video above for a progression that you can play along to). You should be able to find sites with good content to play along to by searching for “A Blues Scale”.  Here’s a page listing “songs that use blues scales” for starters.

    • Blues Scales in other keys: you’ve learned the chromatic scale in order to help you to determine where to play bar chords. You will need a similar approach to know which key a song is in, and therefore which scale to use. The pattern for the Blues Scales is always the same, but starting at different places on the neck based on what key the song is.
    • Country Scale in A: this scale has the style of makeup as the Blues Scales (i.e. it has five notes and the sixth will be the octave of the root note, or the key of the song). The pattern is a little different, however. Try this scale, taking the same approach as you did with the Blues Scale:

      Once you are comfortable with the scale, try improvising with it over any progression in A major (I provide one as an example in the video above). Just like the Blues Scale, you can put any of the notes of the Country Scale in pretty much anywhere you like for a song in the key of A Major and it sounds fine.
    • Country Scales in other keys: this concept is the same as shifting keys in the Blues Scale. The patterns or forms for the scales remain constant, but the place on the neck changes.
  • Determining the Key: there are lots of tricks for this. Here’s one approach to finding the key of a song. Search online and see if there’s a better way for you. “Major” key songs will use the Country Scale, and “Minor” key songs will use the Blues Scale. You can find lots of content about the theory around major and minor keys, and we will dig further into this in the next few Big Ideas. 

Deeper:

  • Bending Notes: this technique allows you to play a note, then change that note fluidly into a different note. Search for “guitar bending notes” online. Here’s a monster player giving some great examples:

 

  • Double Stops: this technique involves playing two or more notes from the scale at the same time. It blurs the line between chords and scales, and is used by many greats – Chuck Berry is the king. There are lots of lessons online to help you out with this.
  • Phrasing: this nebulous topic tries to get to the heart of what notes go where (and even where they do NOT go). Different players will play even the same things a little differently from each other, and it is phrasing that will make you unique. Do a search for guitar phrasing lessons or techniques and you will find a lot of different approaches to learn from. Phrasing is affected by everything you do to strike a note, being aware of the little things you can do to change your phrasing can make you a much better player, and lead to a lot of musical discoveries. Here’s a favorite video of mine: Paul Gilbert on Phrasing.
  • Harmonics: earlier we saw an example of using “harmonics” for tuning. There are ways to produce harmonics all over the guitar neck.
  • Relative Major / Minors: This is a concept you’ll run into over and over again when using scales. There are many perspectives you can take with this, from memorizing the relationship pattern to diving deep into the theory. If you like to solo and improvise, search out content that makes the best sense to you on this topic and learn it deeply – it will take you far. Heres one of my favorite videos on this topic when using pentatonic scales:

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