New flute key B pentatonic material oak. Minor pentatonic scale on guitar

It's no secret that improvisation is the highest point for every musician. Mastering it requires years of training and analysis music system. But even after mastering everything you need to create truly wonderful music, you will understand that there is no limit to perfection and there are still many things that you have not discovered for yourself. In this article I will introduce you to the range "pentatonic scale", which will fall into basis your guitar improvisation.

Pentatonics

Pentatonic scale This is a great instrument for blues, jazz and rock musicians. Her uniqueness is that it fits almost any harmony and fits into many musical situations and styles. The pentatonic scale consists of five notes and has very convenient and visual fingerings on the neck of the guitar.

In theory pentatonic scale is a scale consisting of five notes (steps). Pentatonic scale happens major And minor, as well as when adding chromatism to minor And major scale, you can get the so-called one, which has a characteristic blues sound.

Five boxes of minor pentatonic scale

Minor tones And halftones:

In key La Minor notes are written like this:

La Do Re Mi Sol La

As the name suggests, these notes should be used on top minor chords.

Most guitarists will be comfortable in the first position, and very few will be comfortable with all five. Positions 2 and 4 are competing for second place. Well, further down the slope. In order to understand the principle itself, you need master all pentatonic boxes. If anyone didn’t understand right away, then each position is a continuation of the previous one. Black The dots in each position are the tonic, that is, the main degree of the scale. White- all other notes are in key.

Five major pentatonic boxes

Major The pentatonic scale is built according to the following pattern tones And halftones:

In key La-major notes are written like this:

A Si Do# Mi Fa# A

Based on the name, these notes should be used on top major chords.

• Master each box in any key, visually placing them next to each other on the guitar neck (the tonic will help you with this).
• Sing the name of each note! This will help you learn the notes of the pentatonic scale and find your starting points.
• Play accompanied by instrumental accompaniment in a key convenient for you. For example, in key La-minor:
  
• Top up stock of faces (phrases). In this article you will find cool phrases:

Many beginning guitarists underestimate the importance of playing scales; this activity seems boring and even tedious to them, but let's look for the advantages in this matter, and there are quite a few of them:

• By studying and playing scales, you will be able to learn the location of notes on the fretboard much faster, which we wrote about in the previous article: and in general, the fretboard will feel better, the accuracy of changing positions and understanding of guitar fingering will increase;
• Daily playing of scales will increase the fluency of the fingers of the left hand, increase the accuracy of working with the pick of the right, but most importantly, their synchronization with each other will develop along with this, which directly affects the speed, purity and accuracy of your performance;
• Scales develop ears and a sense of rhythm well and are an excellent basis for future improvisations.

Now that it has become obvious to us that playing scales is extremely useful, we can move on to studying them. And what better place to start than with the bread and salt of any guitarist - the minor pentatonic scale? That's right for no reason, because it is the cornerstone of not only blues guitar, but all modern guitar music; one way or another, the pentatonic scale is used by almost all eminent guitarists, and not just bluesmen from the Mississippi Delta.

Minor pentatonic scale

Pentatonic scale is a scale whose scale consists of five steps, all notes of which can be arranged in pure intervals (fourths or fifths). The figure below shows the fingering for the A minor pentatonic scale, with black dots on which the tonic notes are indicated (that is, the first most stable notes in the scale that determine its tonality; in A minor, this is the note A).

You can play this fingering from any fret, but you need to remember that by moving it along the fretboard, the tonic, and therefore the tonality of the scale, will change, however, we will talk more about transposition in one of the following articles, but for now we will focus entirely on A minor pentatonic scale.

Exercises based on pentatonic scale

To begin, play the ascending passage shown in the tablature below:

It should be played with an alternating stroke (alternate strokes with the pick down and up, if you suddenly forgot or did not read our article). Remember to keep the rhythm, ideally play this passage with a metronome. After you get the hang of it and you start to succeed quickly enough and without errors, you can add a descending one to this passage.

Blues pentatonic scale

The blues scale or blues pentatonic scale is the same pentatonic scale, but with an additional note behind the tonic by a diminished fifth, respectively, in the scale instead of five notes, six are A, C, D, D sharp, E and G, in the figure below presented fingering for A minor blues pentatonic scale

This scale, thanks to the so-called blues note, in the case of the A minor pentatonic scale is D sharp, sounds very blues, but is no less loved by rock musicians.

Blues scale exercises

As an exercise based on the blues scale, you can use a passage very similar to this one. which was used with the A minor pentatonic scale: from the beginning ascending and then descending

Conclusion

In addition to being a good scale for practicing technique, the pentatonic scale is also an excellent basis for improvisation, but we'll talk about that a little later. In the meantime, learn the pentatonic and blues scales, paying special attention to the purity of performance and rhythm.

The pentatonic scale is a five-note scale derived from the major scale. It uses the first, second, third, fifth and sixth degrees of the major scale

Scale C major (C major)

Pentatonic scale BEFORE

Parallel Major and Minor

There is a special connection between the first and sixth degrees of the major scale, which is called parallel. The first degree of the major scale is called Parallel Major. The sixth degree is Parallel minor. To find a parallel minor when a parallel major is given, you would go up a sixth degree in the major mode or a second degree down. Parallel major and minor have the SAME signs at the key.

Five forms of the pentatonic scale

Since there are five notes in the pentatonic scale, there are five different shapes you can use to play the scale starting on a different note each time.

The illustrations show five forms of the pentatonic scale in C major, also known as A minor. The white diamond shows the major tonic, the white circle shows the minor tonic.

On the guitar neck, all five forms of the pentatonic scale are interconnected like puzzles:

Basic rhythmic patterns

The following examples of rhythmic patterns for playing pentatonic scales are given for the 1st form. Practice playing each rhythmic pattern. Start at a slow pace, then gradually speed up the pace of the game.

• Practice playing all forms of the pentatonic scale. Remember them.
• Practice playing the pentatonic scale in all keys.
• Practice connecting the shapes together by playing in all keys along the entire length of the guitar's neck.
• Practice soloing using pentatonic scales in Minor Pentatonic Blues, G Major Pentatonic, and Around the Pentatonic World. Compose your own solo using the scales provided.

A minor pentatonic scale– This is usually the first scale that every beginning guitarist learns. It has a wide range of applications and consists of sounds that work well in rock and blues contexts. I regard the pentatonic scale as an easy version of the A minor scale.

Sounds included in the A minor pentatonic scale

Guitar Neck Diagram

Names of notes included in the pentatonic scale

The sequence of sounds of the A minor pentatonic scale is as follows: A (A) – Do (C) – Re (D) – Mi (E) – Sol (G)

Directions for use and memorization

The A minor pentatonic scale is used for faces and fills. If you want to play melodies, it is recommended to widely use sounds from the A minor pentatonic scale in your playing.

To memorize the pentatonic scale, you can use the following 5 positions, which are needed to visually represent the A minor pentatonic scale throughout the guitar neck. Train all the samples below in turn and you will soon get a feel for this scale.

A minor pentatonic scale in the form of 5 positions on the guitar neck. In each of these positions three notes are played on each string

Pentatonic scale - a sound system containing five steps within one octave, located at major seconds and minor thirds. The pentatonic scale can also be understood as an incomplete diatonic series.

The major pentatonic scale is a natural major scale without the 4th and 7th degrees.

The minor pentatonic scale is a natural minor scale without the 2nd and 6th degrees.

For clarity, let’s depict the production of major and minor pentatonic scales in the diagram:

In addition, if we exclude the 4th and 7th degrees from any major diatonic scale, and the 2nd and 6th from a minor scale, then we also get the major and minor pentatonic scales, respectively:

Ionian major:	Lydian major:	Mixolydian major:
4,7	#4, 7	4, 7
Major pentatonic scale

Aeolian minor:	Dorian minor:	Phrygian minor:
2, 6	2, 6	2, 6
Minor pentatonic scale

Thus, we have the following formulas for the major and minor pentatonic scales:

Below are the 2nd fingerings of the major and minor pentatonic scales on the guitar neck (these fingering forms do not take into account the 1/2 tone shift on the upper strings, i.e. on the 1st and 2nd strings) for playing in one position:

For clarity, let’s depict these fingerings indicating the degrees of the pentatonic scale:

If we combine the right and left fingerings, we get fingerings for playing in one position on all six strings:

Pay attention to the position of the tonic of a parallel major pentatonic scale in a minor one - here it is convenient, using the octave system, to project the combined fingering of parallel pentatonic scales onto the fingerboard. Despite the fact that the pentatonic scale is a fairly simple scale, in which there are only five notes within an octave, this combined scheme helps to better navigate the fretboard:

Well, now let’s go beyond one position and “apply” the pentatonic scale to the entire fretboard. To begin with, it is worth noting that, for certain reasons, the minor pentatonic scale is most widespread among guitarists, so we, depicting the pentatonic scale on the entire fretboard, will choose the minor one and show it from the first fret of the sixth string, i.e. our pentatonic scale will be in the key of Fm. We will also depict the parallel major - A:

But in practice it is better to start studying the pentatonic scale in the key of C major and its parallel Am minor. To do this, the above diagrams simply need to be moved to the desired position:

And finally, let’s see which notes “fell” into the C/Am pentatonic scale:

To play the pentatonic scale along the entire fretboard, it is convenient to consider it in the form of boxes.

Just as diatonic modes exist in pairs (minor and major), so the major pentatonic scale corresponds to a parallel minor scale, which is built from the fifth degree of the major scale, and the minor scale corresponds to a parallel major scale, which is built from the second degree of the minor scale. That is, the structural diagram of the major and minor pentatonic scales is the same, but the reference (tonic) sound changes. More clearly in the diagram:

Because within the natural major scale there are 3 pairs of modes - major and minor parallel to them (diatonic modes), then on the steps of the natural major scale you can build 3 pairs of pentatonic scales - major and minor parallel to them. Moreover, all pentatonic scales built on the steps of the natural major scale have the same fingering structure. Those. Each major mode corresponds to a major pentatonic scale with the structure IIIIIIVVI, and each minor mode corresponds to a minor pentatonic scale IIIIIVVVII. Let's look at this using the example of fingerings for playing on three strings:

The pentatonic scale is the most commonly used scale in blues. Here it is often found with "blue" or "blue" notes. Blues notes - these are chromatic III, V, VII degrees in the major scale. Here's what the major and minor pentatonic scale would look like with the added third degree in major (aka V degree in minor):

The diagram clearly shows that in major III and in minor V it is the same note. Now let's note the blues note in the major and minor pentatonic fingerings, for playing in one position:

Let’s also add stepwise fingering:

The blue note is the leading tone to the second or third degree in a major pentatonic scale (or the fourth or fifth degree in a minor scale).

In fingerings for playing in one position on all six strings, including boxes, the most interesting parts of the fingering are those in which the blues note is on the same string as the adjacent steps. Then these three notes are played by fingering 1-2-3:

This is due to the ability to use various playing techniques - vibrato, slides, bend, hammer-ons and breakdowns, etc. - in a comfortable position. This is especially reflected in the off-box fingerings of the pentatonic scale (see below). Also note the characteristic placement of these three notes on the fretboard relative to the tonic major and minor:

Let's supplement the standard pentatonic fingerings with blues notes:

Let's write our example with a pentatonic scale on the entire fretboard for the key of Fm and parallel A, but with a blues note:

Also note the blues note in the pentatonic example in the key of C/Am:

All notes of the C/Am pentatonic scale with a blue note:

In blues, major harmony is often played with a minor pentatonic scale, which is where these “blue” notes appear in the major scale. The blues-note pentatonic scale can also be represented as boxes.

Below are quite commonly used off-box fingerings of the pentatonic scale in its pure form and with the blues III note (aka V in minor):

Let's combine these fingerings into one:

When playing exercises based on the pentatonic scale, do not forget to add “blues” notes. In principle, by studying the fingering patterns of the pentatonic scale, you can immediately learn them with a blues note.

The following schemes are a game of pentatonic scale in a system of octave positions, which are formed by filling one of the five octave positions with pentatonic scale steps. This is the same technique that was discussed for triads and seventh chords.