This will be a fun lesson. Pentatonic scales are easy to learn, easy to play, and they sound like rock 'n' roll. If you want to start improvising or creating solos on guitar, chances are you'll want to learn at least one or two pentatonic scale shapes. Most blues guitar parts are based around the pentatonic minor scale, or a close variation of it.

The best part about pentatonic scales is that if you know the major scale, you already know how to play the pentatonic major scale and the pentatonic minor scale. (If you don't, don't worry. I'll teach you here, or you can read about major scales.)

First things first: penta means "five." Think of a pentagon, a five-sided shape. A pentatonic scale has five notes in it before starting over an octave higher. Remember that a major scale has seven notes, so we would expect the pentatonic scale would be easier. In fact, we would expect to be able to find the pentatonic scale by taking a major scale and removing two notes. And amazingly, enough, we can do just that! Finally, something about music theory that makes logical sense!

The pentatonic scales might as well be custom made for guitar soloing. Basically, there are a couple of notes in the major scale that sound good when played over all chords in the major key. They may sound good over some chords, but not others. Rather than trying to remember when to use them, musicians, in their practicality, decided to just remove them. Simple as that. What was left over was the pentatonic.

There are two commonly used pentatonic scales: the pentatonic major and the pentatonic minor. In rock music, the pentatonic minor is used more frequently, so I'll present that one first. It's good to learn them both, and in fact, if you know one you know the other, as I'll explain.

The pentatonic minor scale

If you only learn one scale pattern on guitar ever, learn the pentatonic minor box pattern. It's easy, fun to play, and sounds cool. I'll start with an illustration of the pattern, then explain some more of the theory.

Here is how to play an A pentatonic minor scale in the classic "box pattern."

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A C

A

D E

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G A

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C D

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E G

E

A C

What you're looking at is a representation of the guitar fretboard, with the bridge to the left, and the low E string on the bottom. The horizontal lines are the strings, and the vertical lines are the frets. The dots with letters in them represent notes to be played. So, for example, the lowest note in the scale is on the sixth string, at the fifth fret. Next, the sixth string, eighth fret, then the fifth string, fifth fret, and so on.

Here's the same pattern written out in tablature.

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5

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5

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5

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5

8

5

8

E

A

D

G

B

E

There are five established patterns for the pentatonic minor, depending on where you start on the fretboard, but this is by far the most common, and the one you should learn first. I've listed the rest in the reference section at the end, and they are useful to learn as well. You can also use my Scalerator application to tweak where exactly on the fretboard you want to play the scale.

• Discover more ways to play an A pentatonic minor scale with the Scalerator.

Other keys

One nice thing about these patterns is that they are moveable. If you started the above pattern on the eighth fret instead of the fifth fret, you'd have a C pentatonic minor scale. If you start at the open position, you'd have an E pentatonic minor.

• See how to play a C pentatonic minor scale using the Scalerator.
• See how to play an E pentatonic minor scale using the Scalerator.

The notes

The A pentatonic minor scale is exactly like the A natural minor scale, but with two notes removed. These are the notes that on occasion can sound dissonant over the chords in the key of A minor. Here are the notes, for comparison:

As you can see, there is no B and no F, but other than that it's the same. Here is the pattern of intervals in the pentatonic minor scale. (Review intervals)

This pattern holds no matter what key you're in.

When to play it

Blues, blues, blues, and anything based on blues. This scale sounds awesome over a standard twelve-bar blues progression. If it's blues in A, you can play A pentatonic minor and you'll never go wrong.

Rock is based on blues, so pretty much the same thing applies. A lot of country songs are, too. On the other hand, the more ballady, folky stuff works better with the pentatonic major scale, which I will present next. If you're not sure which to go with, try them both, and use whichever sounds better. Like everything in music, play what sounds good is all that matters.

The pentatonic major scale

To get the pentatonic major scale, we can start with a major scale and remove the fourth and seventh notes. So here's how it goes in the key of C.

No B and no F.

If you're clever, or even just observant, you will notice that those are the same notes as the A pentatonic minor I talked about above. This is another example of the concept of relative major and relative minor keys, which I discussed in my natural minor scale lesson. Essentially, if you want to play a C pentatonic major scale but you don't know how, you can just play the A pentatonic minor, but just finish on the C instead of the A. Easy as pie.

In fact, that works for any key. To play a pentatonic major scale, you can always just play the pentatonic minor scale three frets to the left (that is, lowered by a minor third). And vice versa.

So you already know one pentatonic major pattern. Here's another one. This is C pentatonic major. As you may have guessed, this shape can also be used to play an A pentatonic minor.

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C D

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E G

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C D

And here it is in tablature.

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10

E

A

D

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B

E

And here is the pattern of intervals in the pentatonic major scale.

• Discover more ways to play an C pentatonic major scale with the Scalerator.

When to play it

Notes from the pentatonic major can be happily played over any song in a major key. While the pentatonic minor is used for a bluesy sound, over an electric rhythm section, pentatonic major is used more often over strummy, ballady songs. There are really no rules, though, other than play what sounds good, of course. If you can't decide between major and minor, try them both!

Reference

A pentatonic minor scale, position 3

(Note: Position 1 is above. Position 2 is the same as the C pentatonic major, presented above)

(Note also: Any of these A pentatonic minor shapes also represent C pentatonic major.)

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D E

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G A

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C D

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E G

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A C

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D E

As tablature:

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12

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12

E

A

D

G

B

E

A pentatonic minor scale, position 4

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VII

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IX

XII

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E G

A

A C

D

D E

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G A

B

C D

E

E G

As tablature:

0

3

0

3

0

2

0

2

1

3

0

3

E

A

D

G

B

E

A pentatonic minor scale, position 5

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XII

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G A

A

C D

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E G

G

A C

B

D E

E

G A

As tablature:

3

5

3

5

2

5

2

5

3

5

3

5

E

A

D

G

B

E

Related lessons

• Major scales
• Natural minor scales
• Harmonic minor scales
• Melodic minor scales

Ok, stick with me for one more minor scale type, then it gets easier. I promise! This lesson builds on previous ones, so if you haven't read my other scale lessons, now's a good time:

• The major scale
• The natural minor scale
• The harmonic minor scale

And now the melodic minor scale. I think you'll begin to understand why the natural minor is called the natural minor. It's the one that's based on the major scale, and is considered more pure. The other two, the harmonic and melodic minors, were reached by tweaking around with the natural minor. The harmonic minor raised the seventh note in the scale so we could have that strong major V chord (that is, the chord based on the fifth note of the scale). The melodic minor makes one more alteration.

One nice benefit of raising that seventh note is it creates a half-step from the seventh note to the tonic an octave up, as opposed to the whole-step we'd have with the natural minor. People liked this half-step, because it makes the tonic seem more final, more of a completion of the scale. As an example, try playing a major scale, but stop on the seventh note. You'll probably feel like you need to fill in that last note in your mind in order to feel more melodically satisfied. That seventh is called a leading tone, because it "leads to" the tonic.

• Listen to a leading tone example.

So raising the seventh creates a nice leading tone, but it also causes a new problem, and that is the interval between the sixth and seventh notes. In the key of A harmonic minor, that would be between F and G#. This is an interval of an augmented second, also called a minor third. (This might be a good time to review my Intervals lesson if you haven't read it.) To the powers-that-were at the time, this seemed like too big of an interval, almost as if there were a note missing. To solve this, they decided to raise the sixth note as well. In A, that would mean changing the F to F#. But wait, won't that just cause some kind of chain reaction of interval adjustments and mess up the whole scale??? Don't panic. It's ok. Remember the half-step between E and F. So now it's just a whole step between E and F#, which is acceptable. So that's how the melodic minor scale came to be. Here is the interval pattern. You'll notice there are no unhappy minor thirds:

or WHWWWWH.

And here are the notes in the A melodic minor scale.

"But why does it say '(ascending)' in both of those tables?," I can hear you asking. "Why, Eddy, why?" Okay, well, you know that leading note, the seventh? It only really matters if you're going up the scale, leading to the tonic note at the high end. So in their infinite wisdom, the scale-masters of the day decided the melodic minor scale would use one set of notes while going up, or ascending, and another while going down, or descending. So what I showed above is technically the "ascending melodic minor". The good news is that the descending form is just the natural minor scale, which we've alread covered. You can review the natural minor now, if you like.

Honestly, though, the difference between ascending and descending is not a big deal. It's really only applicable to classical music. If you're playing a melody or improvising in a key, you'll most likely pick one scale and stick to it. You can play an ascending melodic minor going down if you want, and the scale police are not going to show up and take you away. In fact, in jazz, they just talk about a melodic minor scale, and make no distinction between ascending and descending. Basically, you get to pick and choose. Still understanding the concepts of the leading note and the harmonic progression from V to i, and knowing how these scales came about can help with your decision.

How to play it

Here's one way to play an A melodic minor scale (ascending).

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This shape covers the whole height of the fretboard and two octaves. Again, play this up and down enough times to learn it, watching some CSPAN as necessary, to keep from going crazy with boredom. Then just play around for a while, and see what kind of melodies you can come up with.

• Find more ways to play an A melodic minor (ascending) scale using the Scalerator.
• See how to play a C melodic minor (ascending) scale using the Scalerator.

Chords

Here are the three-note chords you can create from a melodic minor scale.

The pattern of chord types is no matter what harmonic minor scale we use. In this case, it's minor, minor, augmented, major, major, diminished, diminished.

When to use it

The only way to decide when to use the different types of minor scales is to practice. It's really a matter of taste. You may decide that the melodic minor scale should be used for melodies and the harmonic minor scale should be used for constructing chords, based on their names. You can use the ascending melodic minor when going up, and the natural minor when descending, just as their creators intended. Those are perfectly reasonable conclusions, but don't limit yourself by that.

Practice improvising with a harmonic minor scale over a natural minor chord progression. Practice the other way around. Practice switching between different scales. Practice them all over the neck of the guitar. You'll notice some notes sound good over some chords, and others sound weird or wacky. The best approach is to record yourself playing a minor key chord progression, play it on repeat, and just go to town with soloing on top of it. That can be a lot of fun, too. Don't forget, having fun is why you play!

To save you some trouble, I've recorded one to start with. Here is a backing track you can use to practice. This is a chord progression derived from the E harmonic minor scale. It just repeats the chords Em, Am, and B7, two measures each. The recording contains the progression twice in succession. You can put this on repeat and practice playing around with the E melodic minor scale, the E harmonic minor scale, and the E natural minor scale over it. Pay attention to the different sounds that come from playing each scale over each chord.

• Download the E harmonic minor backing track.

That's it for the difficult minor scales. Not too bad, eh? Later on, we can tackle pentatonic scales, which I think you will find much easier.

The natural minor scale, which I covered in the last lesson, is a nice alternative to the major scale when you want a sadder, mellower kind of sound. It has a weaker resolution to the tonic, which can be just what you're going for. Some people though, back in the day, decided they liked the sound of the minor scale, but wanted a little bit more of a strong resolution. They played around a bit, and what they came up with was the harmonic minor scale. That's what I'm going to cover today.

If you play enough chords for long enough, you'll notice that certain chords seem to lead into others. This is related to the buildup and release of tension, and is a topic I will cover in more detail in future lessons. But one of the strongest chord transitions is from the fifth chord to the tonic chord. If we're in A natural minor, that means from E minor to A minor. However, going from minor to minor, it's still not all that strong. But if we change the E minor to an E major, it's a much stronger transition. The E major "leads to" the A minor. And if you turn it into an E7, it's an even stronger transition. In future lessons, I'll explain why this is, but for now if you don't believe me you can just listen for yourself:

• Hear an Em to Am transition
• Hear an E to Am transition
• Hear an E7 to Am transition

The difference is even more noticeable when the chords are played as part of a larger song.

So lets take the natural minor scale and modify it so it has an E major chord instead of an E minor. As a reminder, these are the notes in the A natural minor scale.

Now to get an E major, we need the notes E, G#, and B, so we take the G and turn it into a G#, giving us:

And there we have it, the harmonic minor scale. You'll really hear this used a lot more than the natural minor in rock, folk, and blues music, because we like that strong resolution to the Am.

How to play it

As you might expect, playing a harmonic minor scale is very similar to playing a natural minor scale, except with one note changed. Here's one way to play an A harmonic minor scale.

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E

This shape covers the whole height of the fretboard and two octaves. Again, play this up and down enough times to learn it, watching some HBO as necessary, to keep from going crazy with boredom. Then just play around for a while, and see what kind of melodies you can come up with.

• Find more ways to play an A harmonic minor scale using the Scalerator.
• See how to play a C harmonic minor scale using the Scalerator.

Chords

Here are the three-note chords you can create from a harmonic minor scale. You'll notice that in going from the natural minor to the harmonic minor, changing that G to a G# affects more than just the E chord. The C goes from major to augmented, and the G major changes to a G# diminished. Also, you can play either F major or F minor.

And once again, the same pattern of minor and major chords holds no matter what harmonic minor scale we use. In this case, it's minor, diminished, augmented, minor, major, major, diminished. I've highlighted the chord types that are different from the natural minor.

Example

Harmonic minor scales and keys are used a lot. One example most people know is the old folk hymn Go Down Moses. Here are the chords for that, in the key of E minor. You'll notice it uses both a Bm and a B7, so it's going back and forth between the natural and harmonic minors. This is a common technique. When writing or improvising, you get to pick and choose which one you want to use for a given part of the song. Notice how the B7 really sweetly sets up that Em.

This is also a fun song to sing, if you like to hit those looow notes. Try playing the guitar in a bass-strum, bass-strum kind of pattern. It's a religious song, but it's well-known enough as a folk song that it doesn't have to be played in a religious context.

Em          Bm     Em
When Isreal was in Egypt land,
B7             Em
"Let my people go."
Em           Bm        Em
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
B7             Em
"Let my people go."

Em       Am     B7                Em
Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt land
         B7                      Em
Tell old Pharoah, "Let my people go."
...
    

And of course, the song keeps going.

• Listen to me playing Go Down Moses

Well, hope you had fun. Tune in next time for the melodic minor!

Minor scales

I covered major scales in the last lesson. Today I go minor. It's really not that much of a leap from major to minor, so this should be an easy lesson, or at least easier. I'll cover three types of minor scales in total: natural minor, melodic minor, and harmonic minor. Today, I'll start with the easiest one, the natural minor.

If you recall, our definition of a scale is a sequence of notes played in a row that spans an octave. A major scale is made up of seven notes that follow a certain pattern of intervals. That pattern is:

or WWHWWWH.

The natural minor scale

The natural minor scale follows the following pattern:

or WHWWHWW.

So if we start with an A note and make a natural minor scale, we end up with the following:

No sharps or flats. "But wait a minute, Eddy!" I hear you saying, "You screwed up! Those are the same notes as the C major scale! Man, I thought you were smarter than that..."

Ah ha! That's right. It turns out the natural minor scale is the same as the major scale, but starting at a different place. It's kind of like if you watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy starting with The Two Towers, then watched The Return of the King, then finished up with The Fellowship of the Ring. Or maybe a better analogy would be Star Wars, since most people actually watched it in a sort-of shifted order, starting with episode IV, then V, VI, followed by I, II, and III later. Star Wars is the natural minor scale of science fiction franchises, even if we may want to pretend episodes I and II never happened.

Ok, so an A natural minor scale is just a C major scale with a different starting place. Why does it need a separate name? Well, it comes back to the whole concept of a tonic note that I discussed before. When a song is in the key of C major, it usually ends on a C, it often starts on a C, basically the whole melody kind of orbits around that C note. That's the root, the tonic, the resolution. If we think about those same notes differently, if the song revolves around the A instead of the C, if we think of the A as the tonic, if we end on A, we can still get a kind of resolution. It's a different sort of resolution, a minor one. It's a little less final-sounding than in a major key. A little more relaxed. A little sadder, maybe. Sort of like the end of The Revenge of the Sith.

Relative major and minor

Because A natural minor uses the same notes as C major, A natural minor is called the relative minor key of C. It's easy to find the relative minor key of any major key by just going up six notes on the scale (C, D, E, F, G, A). So E natural minor uses the same notes as G major, B natural minor uses the same notes as D major, and so on. And likewise, C is the relative major of A minor.

But how can we tell whether a song is in a major key or it's relative minor? Well, one big clue is the harmony. A lot of minor chords often means a minor key, a lot of major chords often means a major key. The biggest factor, though, is determining where the tonic note is.

The concept of a tonic note is hard to describe because it's a sort of nebulous concept. The same sequence of notes can be interpreted by one person as being in the key of C major and by another person as in A minor. The notes don't change, just the interpretation. Surprisingly, though, this doesn't happen very often. Studies have actually been done where various people were played a melody and asked to interpret what key it was in, and the vast majority of the time they agreed with eachother. Key determination is one of those things where it's hard to come up with hard and fast rules to define it, but you know it when you see it.

How to play it

Here's the good news: if you know how to play a major scale, you already know how to play a natural minor scale. When you want to play an A natural minor, just play a C major, but start and end on A. Easy as pie. Here's one way to play an A natural minor:

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E

This shape covers the whole height of the fretboard and two octaves. Again, play this up and down enough times to learn it, watching some ESPN as necessary, to keep from going crazy with boredom. Then just play around for a while, and see what kind of melodies you can come up with.

• Find more ways to play an A natural minor scale using the Scalerator.
• See how to play a C natural minor scale using the Scalerator.

Chords

Just as we can create chords from a major scale, we can create chords from a natural minor scale. As you might expect, a natural minor scale results in the same chords as its relative major. Here are the three-note chords derived from the A natural minor scale:

And once again, the same pattern of minor and major chords holds no matter what natural minor scale we use. In this case, it's minor, diminished, major, minor, minor, major, major.

Here's the chart for the key of F natural minor:

• See how to play an F natural minor scale using the Scalerator.

What's next?

Turns out that's not the end of the story for minor keys. Tune in next time for the harmonic minor and the melodic minor.

I don't know about you, but the word "scale" scares the crap out of me. I picture some white-wig-wearing little boy tinkling the same "do re mi" blah blah blah over and over on a piano as a stern-faced matron tells him to watch his posture.

Well, it's not quite so bad as all that. Scales turn out to be enormously useful for coming up with melodies, soloing, and for practicing technique.

Introducing scales

The simplest definition of a scale is just a bunch of notes played in a row. For our purposes, it's a sequence of notes played in a row that span an octave. In other words, if a scale starts on C it ends on C an octave higher. We normally think about them being played in order, either ascending or descending, but it's also fun to just noodle around with the notes in any order. In fact, that's what's called playing in a key.

Introducing the major scale

The most common type of scale in the type of music we care about is the major scale. It contains seven notes, can start on any note, and then follows a pattern of intervals. The major scale pattern is:

More succinctly, WWHWWWH, or 2,2,1,2,2,2,1.

You'll notice the interval lengths add up to 12, which is an octave. The two half-steps there are pretty important. Some experiments have been done with made-up scales that used evenly spaced notes, and it was found that the melodies didn't come out as nice. The unevenness of the scale helps us to know where we are in relation to the beginning and end. When playing in a key, a melody usually finishes on the starting note, called the root, or tonic.

We're so used to hearing melodies built this way that if a song doesn't end on the tonic, we're left waiting, waiting, waiting for more notes to come. Then when the tonic finally comes there's a great big sigh of relief, or resolution. This is a very powerful tool in the hands of a good songwriter or performer. You know when blues bands sometimes make the ending of a song last for minutes at a time? They're just building up tension, making the audience anticipate what's coming next? Well, that's what they're doing, is delaying resolution to the tonic. Our ears instinctively know on what note a song should end, so until it comes the song doesn't seem "over." But then when it comes, oh boy! The cymbals crash, the guitarists smashes his ax against the amplifiers, the bassist runs around like an animal. The groupies go crazy. In other words, everything returns to normal. Nice.

A scale is named after the tonic, so if we start with a C and make a major scale, it's called a C major scale, logically enough. The notes in a C major scale happen to be all the notes that don't have flat or sharp symbols:

This only works for C, unfortunately. The half-steps between E and F and between B and C just happen to be in the right places. If we start on any other note, we need to add some accidental symbols. So if we start with D, for example, we get two sharp symbols:

You can refer back to the Musical Alphabet lesson and the Intervals lesson to verify the intervals come out right. WWHWWWH again.

How to play it

The nice thing about playing guitar is we can learn a few simple patterns for a scale, then move them where ever we want on the fretboard to get a major scale in any key. Here's the most commonly used scale shape for major scales. This is starting on the fifth fret, so it's the A major scale, but if you start on the eighth fret, you'd have a C major. If you start on the 12th fret, it's an E major, and so on.

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B

E

This shape covers the whole height of the fretboard and two octaves. Playing this up and down is useful for practice and for learning, though it can get boring and it's not exactly musical. I suggest practicing in front of the television. I know, a classical teacher would be shocked, but better to keep your interest. Once you learn it, it's more interesting and fun to try jumping around, coming up with melodies. You'll find most melodies we're familiar with are based on the major scale. Happy Birthday, for example, or America the Beautiful.

• Find more ways to play an A major scale using the Scalerator.
• See how to play a C major scale using the Scalerator.

What is it used for?

Once we've chosen a major scale, we have a key as well. If we use a melody based on the notes in the C major scale, for example, we say that song is in the key of C major. The melody of a song written in the key of C major will use notes taken from the C major scale, and will resolve to the tonic note, C.

Chords from a scale

We can also come up with chords from the notes in the scale. If you start the note C and take every other note in the scale, you'll get C, E, and G, which happens to be a C major chord. (See the lesson on chords for how that works.) Hmm... C major scale... C major chord... Coincidence? I think not!

Likewise, if we start on the second note of the scale, D, we get D, F, A, which is a D minor chord. We can start at any position on the scale and come up with a chord. We say these are the chords in the key of C:

The pattern of major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished holds for every major key. That's why I've put those Roman numerals above the chord names, to help you remember. The second chord (written in lowercase as "ii") in a major key is always a minor, the third, "iii", is minor as well, the fourth and fifth are major, and so on.

Here's the chart for the key of F:

See? Same pattern.

• See how to play an F major scale using the Scalerator.

What these lists of chords mean is that a song that is written in the key of C major will most likely be harmonized using the chords that come from the C major scale, just as the melody will most likely come from the notes in the C major scale. (Notice I say most likely. As we know, there are no hard and fast rules in music, and some of the greatest fun comes from breaking what guidelines do exist.)

The knowledge of what chords and notes go with what key is invaluable for soloing and improvising. If you know a song is in the key of D major, for example, you know you can play notes from the D major scale over it, and it will sound good.

What's next?

There are of course more ways to arrange an octave worth of notes than just the major scale. Tune in next week when I discuss minor scales and pentatonic scales.